The world is currently focused on Pope Francis’ involvement in the affair of clerical sex abuser Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. However, the recent claims made by former apostolic nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò against Pope Francis in the matter are only the beginning of a long record of sex abuse cover-ups by Pope Francis and Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio that stretches back decades.
Although Francis famously claimed in his 2010 book On Heaven and Earth that sex abuse by clergy “has never occurred in my diocese” and “in the diocese it never happened to me,” the evidence to date indicates that Pope Francis is involved in multiple cover-ups of clerical sexual predators in South America, including his own archdiocese. His involvement in at least two of these cases has continued during his papacy.
In a 2017 documentary by the French news program Cash Investigation, six different individuals claiming to be sex abuse victims in the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires told reporters that they had been sexually abused by clergy there, and that they had written to Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to inform him, but that he had never answered their complaints (see video below).
To this day Pope Francis has only expressed regret for one of these cover-ups, the Barros affair, following a massive public outcry in Chile over his strong-arm tactics against victims. The other cases continue to be hushed-up, ignored, and stonewalled.
The pope recently told sex abuse survivors in Ireland that those who cover up sexual abuse are “caca” (feces) and recently said that such priests should be removed and their accusers should be accompanied in the civil courts. However, Francis has done exactly the opposite, and continues to refuse to meet with victims he not only refused to accompany, but whom he sought for years to discredit with judges.
LifeSite is including links to its sources in the Spanish-speaking and French media regarding these cases so that the public can verify their veracity and to facilitate the reporting by other journalists on this topic.
The case of Julio César Grassi, convicted child sex abuser defended by Bergoglio
Perhaps the most egregious case of obstruction, stonewalling, and negligence regarding a clerical child sex abuser on the part of Jorge Bergoglio was that of Julio César Grassi, a priest famous throughout Argentina for his work with poor and orphan children, and who became the subject of numerous accusations by teen residents of his facilities, which led to his conviction for sex abuse of a minor in 2013 as well as other charges and a sentence of more than 15 years in prison.
While refusing to speak to Grassi’s victims, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio engineered a campaign to discredit the victims and to influence the judges in the case, which may have resulted in some of the charges being dismissed. Despite these efforts, Grassi was convicted in the case of one victim who was able to identify hidden marks and other characteristics of Grassi’s body, and his conviction has been upheld by multiple appeals courts, including a final ruling by the Supreme Court of Argentina in March of 2016. Nonetheless, Pope Francis continues to allow Grassi to function as a priest. Despite ongoing requests, Francis has not yet met with victims nor apologized to them.
Fr. Julio Cesar Grassi is a priest of the Diocese of Morón, which was under Bergoglio’s metropolitan authority as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. There Grassi personally oversaw a residential facility housing approximately 400 children. The priest’s efforts to raise money for his “Happy Children Foundation” (Fundación Felices los Niños), which managed seventeen facilities throughout the country for over six thousand children, made him a national celebrity and generated the equivalent of millions of dollars in donations annually.
Grassi’s image as a crusader for a humanitarian cause made him a subject of national pride and gave him immense public credibility, as he forged close relationships with some of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in Argentinean society. By the late 1990s he had become a priest celebrity who seemed untouchable.
However, Grassi’s charitable empire began to collapse in 2002 when a series of investigative reports in the Argentinean media revealed a total of five accusations against him of sexual abuse from former residents of his care facilities, some of which had been on file with the police for two years. The alleged victims said that Grassi had made attempts to sexually seduce them and had performed perverse sexual acts on them. The television program Telenoche Investiga, which first reported the case, reported that Grassi also had been accused of sexual predation against seminarians as vice rector of a seminary in 1997. The country was riveted by the claims and Argentineans were divided over the likelihood of their veracity.
As a result of the media investigations, Grassi was soon prosecuted for over a dozen charges of sexual abuse of three of the purported victims. What followed was a 15-year saga in the courts of Argentina, in which Grassi and his team of over twenty high-power attorneys repeatedly attempted to intimidate and discredit Grassi’s accusers.
“Gabriel,” the victim whose testimony resulted in Grassi’s conviction, says that the harassment against him and attempts to steal evidence from him became so strong that he had to be enrolled in a witness protection program. His story is corroborated by his psychiatrist and advocate, Enrique Stola, who has stated repeatedly to the press that he himself was threatened and that his house had been entered multiple times by people who had beaten him over his involvement in the case.
One of Grassi’s attorneys, Miguel Angel Pierri, was jailed twice after having falsely portrayed himself as a lawyer for one of the purported victims for the purpose of taking the victim to a court and pressuring him to retract his testimony. The “retraction” was later thrown out by the court when the deception was discovered.
To this show of force by the powerful Grassi was added the clout of the four-member Executive Committee of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, including Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as the conference’s Second Vice President, which sought to portray Grassi’s prosecution as an anti-Catholic conspiracy, a line similar to the one taken by Grassi’s legal team.
In a thinly-veiled reference to the Grassi case, the episcopal conference’s executive committee claimed it was “astounded by the persistence of attacks which, in our day, seek to smear the image of the Church.” While admitting that priests are capable of sinning and expressing a desire to reach the truth, the committee added, “It may be that the hidden side of this campaign is the desire for the Church to lose its trust that society places in it, or for it to cease to expound upon the moral and social consequences of its principles.”
It was this conspiracy-theory approach to the case that Cardinal Bergoglio would maintain after being elected President of the Argentinean Episcopal Conference in 2005, despite the mounting evidence and repeated convictions of Grassi as the years wore on.
Bergoglio’s stealth campaign against Grassi’s victims
Bergoglio was not satisfied, however, with vague accusations of ulterior motives behind the prosecution. While it appears that neither Bergoglio nor the Bishop of Morón undertook a canonical investigation of Grassi, and Bergoglio ignored requests by the victims to discuss their accusations with him, the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires began a stealth campaign to discredit the victims with the judges in the case and secure a verdict of innocence.
Bergoglio’s effort to prevent the conviction of Grassi went so far as to include the commission of a series of four books devoted to casting doubt on the purported victims’ testimonies and attacking the victims themselves. The books were produced for Bergoglio and the Argentinean Episcopal Conference by the eminent jurist Marcelo Sancinetti. The series was entitled, “Studies on the ‘Grassi case,’” and filled more than 2,600 pages.
The books seek to discredit Grassi’s purported victims, openly calling them “false accusers” and even implying that they are projecting their own homosexual desires onto Grassi. Echoing Grassi’s arguments and those of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, they theorize that the prosecution of Grassi has arisen out of a conspiracy against his “Happy Children Foundation” by several media outlets who were seeking to destroy the organization. In an epilogue Sancinetti goes so far as to compare Grassi to the prophet Daniel placed in a den of lions.
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