RFI speaks with Pedro Lima, the former religious man who suffered reprisals from two superiors of the Company, one of them linked to the leadership of the order in the Vatican. One of the Vatican’s top sex crimes investigators has already arrived in Bolivia as the wave of cases continues to rise. Luis Arce sent a letter to the highest representative of the Vatican in which he asks for a joint review of the background of foreign religious who entered his nation.
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While the cases of complaints against pedophiles within the Catholic Church continue to increase Day by day, Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, one of the Vatican’s leading investigators of sexual crimes, has already arrived in Bolivia as a special envoy of Pope Francis. President Luis Arce He had sent a letter to the pontiff in which he asked him to review the background of the religious. For its part, the Bolivian Episcopal Conference pointed out that Bertomeu’s visit not directly related to the recent allegations, but that it had been previously planned to analyze “the advances in the field of the culture of prevention” promoted by the Vatican. However, currently, Bertomeu focuses on inquiries of this type. He arrived on Bolivian soil from Paraguayan, where he had been investigating similar allegations against Church officials. The expert had already been in charge, in 2018, of an investigation into abuses committed by priests against minors in Chile.
Peter Limathe former Jesuit who came to Bolivia to uncover and reveal details of dishonest abuse carried out by Catholic religious, has contributed his testimony to RFI in Spanish: “The trouble is that I was talking about the cases. They told me that dirty laundry is washed inside (…) The answer was that they expelled me.” Lima was a Jesuit between 1992 and 2001. He spent as a novice and teacher in several cities (Oruro, Cochabamba and Sucre). In all of them he recounts that he witnessed the abuse. Lima, who testified before the prosecution body on Monday, May 22, accused three Jesuits of covering up the alleged abuses. The abuses he witnessed happened at the end of the nineties, in Sucre, when Lima was a teacher of the order.
Testimony of Pedro Lima in RFI
Pedro Lima points directly to a “very powerful” name in the RFI antenna: Marcos Recolons, at that time a high position of the order in Bolivia that a few years later would reach the top of the order in the Vatican. “Recolons called me to tell me that the company was sanctioning me and cutting off my financing [de los estudios] because he kept talking about the pedophilia cases. It was a way to silence me.”
“We are aware that there are still very serious cases, that public opinion is not aware of, but we are going to express so that they can also be expanded,” says Lima.
Testimony of Pedro Lima in RFI – Second part
Lima reveals these episodes, 22 years later, encouraged by the pedophilia scandal that has shaken Bolivia this week: the story of the Spanish Jesuit Alfonso Pedrajas, alias Picawho died in 2009, who is at the origin of the scandal.
The origin of the scandal
The authorities are investigating whether any official of the Catholic Church in the country should be held accountable after the publication of a diary by the late Spanish Jesuit priest Alfonso Pedrajaswhich contained multiple confessions of child abuse.
According to private texts accessed by the Spanish newspaper ‘El País’, Pedrajas allegedly abused some 85 minors in Catholic boarding schools in Bolivia in the 1970s and 1980s. The priest died of cancer in 2009.
Furthermore, after his death, His nephew found a 300-page diary on his computer in which Pedrajas confessed to having sexually abused dozens of minors Also in the 1970s.
One of the most shocking confessions recorded in the diary relies on the fact that Pedrajas wrote that he had spoken to his superiors about what he had done, but they did nothing about it.
After the information was disclosed by the Spanish newspaper last April, complaints from former students have been triggered about other cases of sexual abuse in schools run by religious in Bolivia, including Jesuits, but also Dominicans, Franciscans and other orders of the Catholic Church.
Arce asks Pope Francis to review background
In recent years, different countries in Europe and America, among other parts of the planet, have exposed thousands of sexual abuses committed by priests, bishops or other members of the Catholic clergy.
In many of the cases, the investigators have pointed out that they were recurring crimes, in which there was a cover-up for years.
Now, when his country is rocked by the same type of accusations, the Bolivian president, Luis Arce, sent a letter to the highest representative of the Vatican in which he asks for a joint review of the background of foreign religious who entered his nation.
(With AFP, El País and RFI’s own sources)
