Among the various reasons why Pope Francis was detested by many bishops, in addition to being a Jesuit and having refused to come to Spain on an official trip, his decision to investigate the origin of the abuse and the reasons for covering it up stood out. It decided that the Vatican assigned two Uruguayan bishops, and not Spanish prelates, to report on the functioning of the seminaries, with the recommendation to ignore the interference of diocesan prelates. After almost two years have passed and all the bishops were called to consult in the Vatican, nothing more is known about the results, but there were three pieces of advice, appropriate to the case of what happened in the seminary of Getafe with its rector and now former bishop of Cadiz, Rafael Zornoza: change the way of training seminarians, include women in the teaching staff and permanent supervision, from all points of view.
Since then, the comment that Francisco made when he learned that the outrages of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel, had been known since his time as a student at the Jesuits in the pontifical seminary of Comillas, in Cantabria, and that they were covered up for 63 years. You don’t punish a friend of the Pope, you heard. One of our own is neither investigated nor disturbed. We are talking about none other than the bishops, those chosen by God as supreme pontiffs in their dioceses. That’s how they believe. With this idea, many media, which define themselves as Catholic, have resisted reporting on cases of pedophilia in the Roman Church for decades. A bad bishop? Priests or friars, again, but a bishop, a cardinal? Impossible.
Those journalists! Francis himself, on a trip to Chile in 2018, fell into the trap that is still heard today among clergy, according to which news of abuse by the clergy are campaigns by anticlerical media or by powers angry with the Pope in power (in the United States, because the Vatican opposed the war in Iraq). When Francis changed the subject and ordered zero tolerance, no matter who fell, he candidly revealed that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, had gone to John Paul II’s office with the dossier on the scandals of the almighty Maciel and returned with the order to keep the dossier until a better opportunity. He had won the bad guy’s game, he came to say. Months later, Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life, reinforced the blow: “Whoever covered them up was a mafioso, it wasn’t the Church.”
With such virulence the zero tolerance order came to fruition. It is worth understanding the amazement with which much of the Spanish hierarchies greeted it, in particular the need to publicly acknowledge guilt, the request to take care of the victims and to articulate economic compensation. The current president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Msgr., had already expressed his opinion on the problem. Luis Argüello. In Spain, he said, “these are only small cases.”
After being quoted so much, this phrase, coming from the spokesperson of those who believe they are the moral guides of society, has ceased to surprise. There are worse and higher grade ones. This is the case of Cardinal Antonio Cañizares, former primate of Spain and now emeritus of the archbishopric of Valencia. Called to Rome by Benedict XVI as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (as his ministry was called), from that position he stated that what could have happened in some schools, with lives destroyed by abortion, is not “comparable”.
