While Cardinal Ángel Fernández Artime today walks the Vatican corridors vested with the authority of Pro-Prefect of the Dicasterio for Consecrated Life and newly appointed judge of the Court of Cassation, Pedro Mario Ayala —a surviving victim of the sexual abuse committed by a priest against him when he was a minor within the Salesians— suffers the aftermath of a trauma that has led him to psychiatric hospitalization. A recent investigative article by InfoVaticana has revealed the details surrounding this unfortunate case.
The painful aspect of this story is that Artime —as superior of the Salesians— ended up protecting and shielding the perpetrator with a cloak of bureaucratic impunity, while abandoning the victim to his fate, producing a terrible paradox: the current person in charge of overseeing, accompanying, and supervising all Catholic religious life in the world —let us not forget that, despite being subject to Sor Simona Brambilla as pro-prefect, his role is theologically and canonically indispensable in matters relating to the sacrament of holy orders— is the same person responsible for managing a case of sexual abuse marked by opacity, legal reductionism, and the most absolute negligence.
In 2015, Artime assured the victim Ayala: “I cannot be complicit in this.” However, the facts indicate that his complicity was hidden behind flagrant bureaucratic negligence. For Cardinal Artime, the rape of a minor within the Salesians was simply a “violation of the sixth commandment.”
Today, thanks to documented revelations, we know that the entire defense structure built to protect the perpetrator is not only ethically unsustainable but also legally invalid. Artime took refuge in the claim that Ayala was over 16 years old at the time of the abuse, supposedly between 1994 and 1996. However, the victim has publicly denounced that the systematic abuse and inappropriate touching actually began in the 1993-1994 cycle, when he had just turned 15.
Continue reading at Infovaticana