Six weeks before American cardinal Robert Prevost became Pope Leo XIV, the group activist group of abused survivors (Snap) filed a complaint against him, along with other church leaders, to Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
The group claimed that Prevost “damaged the vulnerable and caused scandal” by dealing poorly with two situations – in Chicago, 2000, and in Peru, 2022 – involving priests accused of sexual abuse.
The activists stated that, as a provincial supervisor of the Agostinian Order in Chicago in 2000, Predost allowed a priest accused of abusing at least 13 minors to live in St. John Stone’s Convent of Agostinian in Hyde Park, half a block from St. Thomas The Apostle. The priest, James Ray, had been prohibited since 1991 from doing parish work or being alone with minors – restrictions that the Chicago Archdiocese observed in requesting PREVOST to allow Ray to live in the convent, according to the complaint.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Prevost acted as a parish priest and diocesan authority in Peru. He returned to the country in 2015, when Pope Francis appointed him bishop of the diocese of Chiclayo, Peru. In 2022, three women filed a complaint to Prevost, accusing two priests of sexual abuse in 2007, when they were minors, as reported by The Pillar, a Catholic investigative journalism project.
The women filed civil complaints, claiming that the diocese did not act or informed the civilian authorities about the allegations. But the prosecutors ended the case a month later, saying that the prescription period had expired, according to the SNAP complaint.
The diocese denied women’s allegations, stating that Prevost met them personally when they filed the initial complaint. Diocese claimed to have suspended a priest after the complaint and that the other was no longer in ministry due to his advanced age and health problems. He also stated that he sent the complaint to superior authorities in Rome to an office known as the Dicker for the Doctrine of the Faith. But the dicker has closed the case in 2023.
The SNAP complaint claims that Prevost, as a bishop, did not open an investigation, did not adequately report civil prosecutors, nor restricted the number of priests involved. The women also said church researchers never talked to them, SNAP told Pearson to CNN.
Prevost’s successor as Bishop of Chiclayo, Guillermo Cornejo, reopened the case in 2023 and called for a new investigation after one of the three women made public his accusations as reported by The Pillar.
Rodolfo Soriano Nuñez, a sociologist at Mexico City who wrote extensively about the Roman Catholic Church and his way of dealing with clerical sexual abuse, said Predost was one of the few bishops in Peru that tried to address priests’ sexual abuse, creating a commission to deal with these cases.
While serving as Bishop of Chiclayo, Predost told La Republica newspaper in 2019: “We rejected cover -up and confidentiality” on cases of sexual abuse. He urged people to report if they are aware of abuse against minors by a priest.
This content was originally published in organization accuses Papa Leão XIV to deal badly with abuse cases on CNN Brazil.
Source: CNN Brasil
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