Officially, the Catholic Church has adopted a “zero tolerance” attitude towards child abuse. Under pressure following a number of high-profile paedophile affairs, including scandals involving French clergy, the Vatican has insisted that it takes an uncompromising stance on the subject. However, according to a joint investigation by Mediapart and French television documentary programme Cash Investigation, several senior figures in the Catholic Church have knowingly covered up or defended priests accused of acts of child abuse. Some of these cases directly affect the Vatican itself.
Indeed, the claims reach up as high as Pope Francis himself. For when the Argentine-born head of the Catholic Church was Archbishop of Buenos Aires and president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, he actively took part in a lobbying operation aimed at defending a well-known priest in his country, Father Grassi, who in 2009 was given a 15-year jail term for assaulting two children.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
That judicial verdict caused huge shockwaves in Argentina because Julio Grassi had been a star in his native land. He was modern, media-friendly and very influential and over the years his relationships with people at the highest national levels in the worlds of politics, economics and culture had turned him into a major figure. A clever speaker, Father Grassi came across as a benevolent priest as he did the tour of the country's television talent shows, presented his own radio programme and backed charity missions, seeking to represent the very embodiment of a virtuous Church.
Then in 2002, after several allegations had been nipped in the bud, the well-known investigative television programme Telenoche Investiga managed to unearth the shameful practices of this priestly role model: Julio Grassi was openly linked with assaults on minors at the Felices Los Niños ('Happy Children') Foundation which he had set up in 1993.
The central plank of the investigative report was the story of 'Gabriel', who had been raped at the age of 15. His testimony provoked the biggest paedophile scandal the Argentine church has known. Even today the young man lives as a recluse in the suburbs of Buenos Aires through fear of reprisals. 'I have received threats, there's proof,” he told Mediapart's colleagues at Cash Investigation. “Some people broke into my home, broke my door. They stole some personal items but also some documents what could have been of use to me during the Grassi trial. In the end the justice system was forced to take action for my safety: I was placed in a witness protection scheme before the trial,” he says.
The violence of the judicial battle also deeply affected 'Gabriel'. From the start of the scandal Julio Grassi hired the best lawyers, around 20 in total, who adopted a very aggressive defence strategy. The priest was also able to count on the unflagging support of his church hierarchy. “The attitude of the Pope since 2002, when he was a cardinal, until today helped facilitate Grassi's impunity,” says Juan Pablo Gallego, a lawyer for the victims. “If Bergoglio [editor's note, the Pope's real surname] agreed with the Church's doctrine, already in place under Benedict XVI [editor's note, Pope from 2005 to 2013], Grassi would have been jettisoned a long time ago, reduced to the laity and no longer allowed to be part of the Catholic Church.'
But the Church was not merely a passive onlooker, allowing Father Grassi to remain in the Church despite the allegations. In 2010, after the priest's first conviction, the Argentine church went as far as to commission a counter report aimed at exonerating the priest. Written by Marcelo Sancinetti, a renowned legal expert who teaches criminal law at the University of Buenos Aires, the report entitled 'Studies on the Grssi case' was commissioned by the Argentine Episcopal Conference. And that body's president at the time was Cardinal Bergoglio, who in 2013 became South America's first pope, taking the name of Pope Francis. The 2,600-page report sought to show that the complainants had lied and even went so far as to raise question marks over the victims' sexuality. For example, an entire chapter was devoted to highlighting “irrefutable information” about the life of one of the complainants, with a view of questioning his heterosexuality. The document argued in just one direction and came to one conclusion: that the justice system had made a mistake and Julio Grassio should be acquitted on appeal.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The Argentine press has already mentioned the existence of this document commissioned by the Pope. But what is less well-known is that far from being simply an internal document, the report was a lobbying tool which was sent to judges handling the case on the very eve of the appeal hearing. The report was also edited on three occasions, in 2010, 2011 and 2013, dates which correspond to the different appeals lodged by the paedophile priest at various courts.
'Subtle pressure on the judges'
Carlos Mahiques, who dealt with the Grassi case, was one of the judges who was sent a copy of the document. He spoke for the first time on camera about this to Cash Investigation. “This is a legal analysis that is biased in certain cases, very biased in others. It's clearly in favour of Father Grassi,” said this respected judge, who now sits on his country's Court of Appeal having briefly served as justice minister for Buenos Aires province in 2016. He says that he only read the document “after having given my verdict” to ensure he was not influenced in his judgement. But the intent was there. “What they wanted to do was exercise subtle pressure over the judges,” says the judge.
The question arises as to whether Cardinal Bergoglio – now the Pope – was behind the sending of the report to judges. If he was not, could he have remained unaware of the fact that the document that he had commissioned had the objective of influencing judges? For the moment the answer is unclear. Despite dozens of requests for interviews over nine months, the Vatican has refused to reply to Mediapart. 'Gabriel' says: “I recall the phrase that Father Grassi repeated at the trial: 'Bergoglio has never dropped me.' Today Bergoglio has become Pope Francis. He's never denied Grassi's comments,” notes the young man.
There was also a curious meeting that took place in September 2013. Just before the Grassi case went back before the Supreme Court in Buenos Aires, the newly-installed Pope Francis invited that court's president, Héctor Negri, to visit Rome. At the time the judge – who has also not responded to requests for a comment – swore that the visit was “uniquely for spiritual reasons” and had no link with the case involving the former star priest Father Grassi.
The Grassi affair is symptomatic of the confusion that surrounds Pope Francis on such issues. Since he was elected, the Pontiff has increased the number of commissions and tough declarations when it comes to the fight against paedophilia. In February 2016, while flying from Mexico to Rome, and at the height of the scandal involving the French cleric Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the Pope declared that a “bishop who changes the parish of a priest who he knows is a paedophile is reckless, and the best thing he can do is to offer his resignation”.
In June 2016 Pope Francis issued a motu proprio or edict and announced the creation of a new tribunal to try bishops; it meant that bishops who were negligent in respect of child abuse in their diocese could be removed. Yet though welcomed, victims' groups say such measures are insufficient and they have accused the Vatican of indulging in hand waving. Back in 2015 the American association for victims of priests, SNAP, had told the church: “It’s time to stop pretending your weak, vague and unenforceable internal church abuse policies, protocols and procedures make any real difference.”
In February 2016 the initiative by Pope Francis had already hit a first obstacle. Peter Saunders, one of only two victims on the commission on child abuse set up by the Pope, was “dismissed” from that body. “A number of members of the commission expressed their concern that I don’t toe the line when it comes to keeping my mouth shut,” Saunders said shortly afterwards. In an earlier interview he had said: 'I was told that Rome was not built in a day, but the problem is that it takes seconds to rape a child.”
Peter Saunders has highlighted the indulgence of Rome towards two senior bishops: the Vatican's financial chief and cardinal George Pell from Australia, who has faced allegations of covering up abuse more than a decade ago, and the Chilean bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros, who has been accused of accused of covering up the sexual abuse of children in his country. In May 2015, Pope Francis had signalled his support for Barros. In a video recorded in Rome he is heard telling senior Chilean clerical officials: “Think with the head, don’t be led around by the nose by these leftists who are the ones who put this [opposition] together,” the Pope is heard saying.
A year later, in May 2016, the Pontiff said in an interview with the French Catholic newspaper La Croix that for France's Cardinal Barbarin – facing accusations he had not reported alleged abuse by a priest to the authorities – to resign would be “an error”. This statement angered the Lyon-based victims' association La Parole Libérée, who are themselves still waiting to be granted an audience with the Pope.
Two years after he was first nominated to be on the Pope's commission, Peter Saunders is bitter about his experience and agreed to talk to Mediapart. He said that when he was invited to join the commission he thought that the Catholic Church was serious when it came to protecting children and that things were going to change quickly. “I was wrong,” he says.”A commission with people from all over the world who meet up just twice a year, that's not taking the issue seriously,” he says. Saunders believes that the real “priority” of the Church appears to be protecting senior clerics.
In March this year the Vatican suffered a further setback in its attempts to tackle the issue of child abuse when the last remaining victim on the commission, Marie Collins from Ireland, decided to step down. Collins, the victim of a paedophile priest when she was a teenager, blamed a continuing “lack of cooperation” on the part of the Vatican and in particular from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the body that defends the Church's doctrine and values and which is responsible for punishing paedophile priests across the world. In the firing line is the CDF's current prefect, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who is facing growing criticism in the corridors of the Vatican.
Even inside the Holy See, officials frequently point to the CDF's lack of cooperation. “I asked how many cases they had, how many they had passed sentence on and in which dioceses … they told me they had the statistics but didn't want to pass them to me,” says an official involved in child protection for the Vatican. “It's true they have a certain culture of secrecy in judicial procedures, whatever they are,” says Bishop Antoine Hérouard, director of the French Seminary in Rome and secretary-general of the Conference of Bishops in France from 2007 to 2014. “For the 'Fight Against Paedophilia' brochure in 2010 I wanted to put in certain figures and I had a lot of trouble gathering them.”
In an open letter to the head of the CDF, published in the National Catholic Reporter earlier this month, Marie Collins regrets the way that the plan for the CDF to have an internal tribunal to try bishops allegedly negligent over child abuse issues has now been dropped. “It was a project you say, only a project?” she asks Cardinal Müller. Collins recalls how in 2015 the Pope had called for the “establishment of a new Judicial Section in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” and for the appointment of a “Secretary to assist the Prefect with the Tribunal”. Four years after his election, the Pope's promises when it comes to the fight against paedophilia are still running into solid opposition from some of the most resistant forces in the Vatican.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter