VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis has defrocked
a 88-year-old Chilean priest who sexually abused teenage boys
over a period of many years and is at the centre of a wider
abuse scandal that is still under investigation, the Vatican
said on Friday.
Father Fernando Karadima was defrocked, or "reduced to the
lay state" by the pope on Thursday, a move the Vatican called
"exceptional" and done "for the good of the Church".
Karadima, who lives in a home for the elderly in the Chilean
capital Santiago, was notified on Friday.
He was found guilty in a Vatican investigation in 2011 and
ordered to live a life of "prayer and penitence", but was not
defrocked at the time, the final years of the reign of former
Pope Benedict. That meant he was still a priest, although he
could not minister in public.
"This justice has been long delayed. It is actually more a
reminder of how slow the pope has been to enact meaningful
reform," Anne Barrett-Doyle, co-director of
BishopAccountability.org, a U.S.-based resource centre that
tracks cases of clerical abuse worldwide, told Reuters.
She called for the same action to be taken against bishops
who allegedly protected Karadima.
Karadima, who has always denied wrongdoing, escaped civilian
justice because of the statute of limitations in the country.
Seven Chilean bishops have resigned since June after an
investigation into an alleged cover-up of Karadima's crimes,
some of them former proteges of Karadima, who prepared them for
the priesthood as young men in Santiago's up-scale, conservative
El Bosque neighbourhood.
Three Chilean men who said they were abused by Karadima
accused one, Juan Barros, the former bishop of Osorno, of having
witnessed Karadima abuse them. Barros has denied this.
During a trip to Chile in January, the pope said he had no
proof against Barros, believed he was innocent, and that
accusations against him were "slander" until proven otherwise.
But days after returning to Rome, the pope, citing new
information, sent sexual abuse investigator Archbishop Charles
Scicluna of Malta to Chile to speak to victims, witnesses and
other Church members.
Scicluna produced a 2,300-page report accusing Chile's
bishops of "grave negligence" in investigating the allegations
and said evidence of sex crimes had been destroyed.
In April, Francis, who is also grappling with sexual abuse
crises in the United States, Germany and Australia, held four
days of meetings in Rome with the three victims - Juan Carlos
Cruz, James Hamilton and Jose Andres Murillo.
"I have a knot in my stomach. I never thought I would see
this day," Cruz said in a tweet thanking the pope. "He
(Karadima) is criminal who has ruined so many people’s lives
with his abuse. I hope thousands of survivors feel a bit of the
relief I feel today."
Following the meeting with the victims, Francis summoned all
of Chile's 34 bishops to Rome in May and they offered their
resignations en masse. Francis has so far accepted seven, and
appointed "apostolic administrators" to run their dioceses.