The case of Fernando Karadima concerned the
sexual abuse of minors
Child sexual abuse (CSA), also called child molestation, is a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent uses a child for sexual stimulation. Forms of child sexual abuse include engaging in sexual activities with a child (whet ...
in
Chile
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in western South America. It is the southernmost country in the world and the closest to Antarctica, stretching along a narrow strip of land between the Andes, Andes Mountains and the Paci ...
, which became public in 2010. It raised questions about the responsibility and complicity of several
Chile
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in western South America. It is the southernmost country in the world and the closest to Antarctica, stretching along a narrow strip of land between the Andes, Andes Mountains and the Paci ...
an bishops, including some of the country's highest-ranking
Catholic
The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...
prelates. By 2018, it attracted worldwide attention.
Fernando Karadima (6 August 1930 – 26 July 2021), a Chilean Catholic priest, was accused as early as 1984 of sexually abusing adolescent boys. Years later, when a church investigator found the accusers credible, his superior, the Archbishop of Santiago de Chile, took no action against him. Karadima's accusers made their charges public in 2010. The
Catholic Church in Chile
The Catholic Church in Chile is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope, the curia in Rome, and the Episcopal Conference of Chile.
The Church is composed of 5 archdioceses, 18 dioceses, 2 territor ...
completed a thorough investigation of the charges that year, and in February 2011 the
Vatican
Vatican may refer to:
Geography
* Vatican City, an independent city-state surrounded by Rome, Italy
* Vatican Hill, in Rome, namesake of Vatican City
* Ager Vaticanus, an alluvial plain in Rome
* Vatican, an unincorporated community in the ...
found Karadima guilty of
sexually abusing minors and psychological abuse. It forced him into retirement, relocated him away from contact with former parishioners and followers, and denied him the right to function as a priest for the rest of his life. Civil legal action against him was thwarted by the statute of limitations.
Karadima had been influential in the spiritual formation and careers of dozens of priests and several bishops. Karadima's accusers charged those bishops and other high-ranking prelates had failed to investigate their claims of sexual abuse and had endangered the minors in their care. When the Vatican found Karadima guilty, one of the bishops associated with him, , resigned from his position as Vice-Chancellor of the
Universidad Católica de Chile
The Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (UC Chile; ) is a traditional private university based in Santiago, Chile. It is one of the thirteen Catholic universities existing in Chilean university system and one of the two pontifical univers ...
. Two others remained as heads of their dioceses, positions they had held since 1996 in one case and 2003 in the other. In 2015, the attempt to install the fourth,
Juan Barros Madrid
Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid (born 15 July 1956) is a Chilean prelate of the Catholic Church. He was Bishop of Osorno from 2015 to 2018. He was Auxiliary Bishop of Roman Catholic Diocese of Valparaiso, Valparaíso from 1995 to 2000, Bishop of ...
, as
Bishop of Osorno, became a multi-year battle, first confined to Chile, but eventually drawing the attention of the Vatican and worldwide media coverage.
First accusations
Fernando Karadima was a spiritual leader and father figure for young men from Santiago's social elite. He was based in the "Parroquia El Bosque", which serves some of Santiago's wealthiest and most influential families. His connections extended to officials in the military dictatorship of
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (25 November 1915 – 10 December 2006) was a Chilean military officer and politician who was the dictator of Military dictatorship of Chile, Chile from 1973 to 1990. From 1973 to 1981, he was the leader ...
and to the papal nuncio to Chile,
Angelo Sodano
Angelo Raffaele Sodano (23 November 1927 – 27 May 2022) was an Italian prelate of the Catholic Church. He served as the Dean of the College of Cardinals from 2005 to 2019 and previously as the Cardinal Secretary of State from 1991 to 2006; S ...
, who became a cardinal and Vatican
Secretary of State in 1991. Karadima was a dynamic leader, described as "Impeccably dressed and with perfectly groomed nails and slicked-back hair", who "cut an aristocratic figure, appealing to both young and old in Chile's elite."
He trained 50 priests and several bishops.
In 1984 a group of parishioners reported "improper conduct" on the part of Karadima to
Juan Francisco Fresno
Juan Francisco Fresno Larraín (26 July 1914 – 14 October 2004) was a Chilean cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Santiago de Chile from 1983 to 1990, and was elevated to the Cardinalate in 1985.
Early life an ...
, Archbishop of Santiago de Chile. One of them later told a court that he learned that their letter was "torn up and thrown away".
Fresno's secretary at the time was one of Karadima's protégés, Juan Barros.
In mid-2003, a young Catholic, José Murillo, informed Cardinal
Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, the new Archbishop of Santiago de Chile, by letter that he had been abused by Karadima. The
Episcopal Conference of Chile
The Catholic Church in Chile is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope, the curia in Rome, and the Episcopal Conference of Chile.
The Church is composed of 5 archdioceses, 18 dioceses, 2 territor ...
had established guidelines for handling accusations of sexual abuse by clergy months earlier, and the guidelines called for an investigation if the accuser demonstrates "good faith" and did not require an assessment of the accusation itself. Errázuriz told Murillo he was praying for him and in June 2004 he opened the first investigation into Karadima. Two years later, the investigator told Errázuriz that he found the accusers credible, and suggested certain courses of action. Errázuriz rejected the report. He explained years later in an interview with the magazine ''
Qué Pasa'' that he mistakenly relied on someone else's assessment: "I made a mistake: I asked and overvalued the opinion of a person very close to the accused and the accuser. While the promoter of justice thought that the accusation was plausible, this other person affirmed just the opposite."
[
]
Investigations
In April 2010 four men once-devoted followers of Karadima filed a criminal complaint. The Public Ministry appointed Xavier Armendáriz as special prosecutor and he promised an unbiased investigation.
Reverend Hans Kast testified that he had witnessed sexual abuse, as did the Reverend Andrés Ferrada "but no one ever did anything about it".[ Reverend Francisco Walker, president of the Ecclesiastical Tribunal, resigned from the court after admitting he had leaked the claimants' personal information to Bishop Arteaga and Father Morales.][
After seven months of investigation, the court dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that there was not enough evidence to charge Karadima. One claimant said: "We would have liked to appeal, but with defence attorneys like this, who have the Appeals and Supreme Court eating out of their hands, and a number of powerful people who continue to protect Karadima, we knew it would be an uphill battle that we were likely to lose".
In response to the public accusations, Chilean church officials conducted their own investigation and in June 2010 submitted a 700-page report to the ]Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) is a department of the Roman Curia in charge of the religious discipline of the Catholic Church. The Dicastery is the oldest among the departments of the Roman Curia. Its seat is the Palace of t ...
(CDF). While that report was under consideration, Pope Benedict XVI
Pope BenedictXVI (born Joseph Alois Ratzinger; 16 April 1927 – 31 December 2022) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 19 April 2005 until his resignation on 28 February 2013. Benedict's election as p ...
accepted the resignation of Errázuriz and named Ricardo Ezzati Andrello
Ricardo Ezzati Andrello (, ; born 7 January 1942) is an Italian-born Chilean prelate of the Catholic Church who has lived and worked in Chile since the age of 17. He was Archbishop of Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santiago de Chile, Santiago fr ...
to succeed him as Archbishop of Santiago de Chile. On 16 January 2011 the CDF found Karadima guilty of abusing minors and sentenced him to a life of "prayer and penance", which the Vatican described as "a lifelong prohibition from the public exercise of any ministerial act, particularly confession and the spiritual guidance of any category of persons". His forced retirement included relocation to a place where he will not have contact with previous parishioners or anyone he mentored. On 18 February, Archbishop Ezzati made the decision public. Karadima continued to maintain his innocence. Ezzati announced on 22 June that the CDF had rejected Karadima's appeal and confirmed its original judgment. Ezzati said "there is no place in the priesthood for those who abuse minors and this confirms the vision of the Church in this case. Karadima acknowledged the judgment with his signature but said Ezzati's "inner convictions are personal". At the time Karadima was living in Providencia in a religious convent.
One of Chile's highest-ranking prelates, long-retired Cardinal Jorge Medina, expressed doubts that Karadima could be properly convicted of "sexual abuse" because "A 17-year-old youngster knows what he is doing." He defended the canonical sanctions imposed on Karadima, given his age and merits. One of Karadima's accusers called the cardinal's remark about 17-year-olds "an unwarranted attack". Another said he regarded Medina's statements as "extremely suspicious, as if he wanted to diminish the outline of these grave actions, reducing the issue to homosexuality in a very silly manner, as if, furthermore, homosexuality and abuse were synonymous". The statements, he said, "were an attempt to free from responsibility someone who took advantage of his position of power over more vulnerable persons".
Later developments
The four bishops who were accused of complicity with Karadima, and their posts when the charges against Karadima became public, were:
*, Auxiliary Bishop of Santiago de Chile and Vice-Chancellor of the Universidad Católica de Chile
The Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (UC Chile; ) is a traditional private university based in Santiago, Chile. It is one of the thirteen Catholic universities existing in Chilean university system and one of the two pontifical univers ...
;
*Juan Barros Madrid
Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid (born 15 July 1956) is a Chilean prelate of the Catholic Church. He was Bishop of Osorno from 2015 to 2018. He was Auxiliary Bishop of Roman Catholic Diocese of Valparaiso, Valparaíso from 1995 to 2000, Bishop of ...
, Military Bishop of Chile;
*, Bishop of Linares, Chile
Linares is a Chilean city and Communes of Chile, commune located in the Maule Region and lies in the fertility (soil), fertile Chilean Central Valley, south of Santiago, Chile, Santiago and south of Talca, the Maule Region, regional capital. Lin ...
;
*Horacio Valenzuela
Horacio del Carmen Valenzuela Abarca (born 5 April 1954) is a Chilean prelate of the Catholic Church, who was Bishop of Talca from 1996 to 2018.
Biography
Horacio Valenzuela was born in Santiago on 5 April 1954. He studied forestry at the Univ ...
, Bishop of Talca, Chile
Talca () is a city and commune in Chile located about south of Santiago, and is the capital of both Talca Province and Maule Region (7th Region of Chile). As of the 2012 census, the city had a population of 201,142.
The city is an important ...
.
Bishop Arteaga stepped down from his position at the Universidad Catolica in March 2011. The university's student union (Federación de Estudiantes de la UC) had urged his removal. A year earlier he had expressed complete support for Karadima. He only reluctantly expressed support for the Vatican action against Karadima, referring in his statement to those "affected" rather than "victims". Arteaga himself had been accused by José Andrés Murillo of ignoring his complaints and recommending a visit with a psychiatrist, "that it was all a misunderstanding of mine, that I should not continue saying those things about Karadima, they had very good lawyers". He remains an Auxiliary Bishop of Santiago de Chile, though by May 2018 he no longer played a public role because of health problems.
In 2013 and 2014, Ezzati and his predecessor Errázuriz coordinated their efforts to prevent Juan Carlos Cruz, one of Karadima's victims and accusers, from being appointed to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors
The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors is a pontifical commission within the Roman Curia of the Catholic Church instituted by Pope Francis on 22 March 2014 as an advisory agency serving the pope. Since 5 June 2022, the Commission ...
. When their correspondence was made public in September 2015, advocates for victims of abuse called for Ezzati's resignation or removal.
Pope Francis appointed Barros Bishop of Osorno, Chile
Osorno (Mapuche language, Mapuche: Chauracavi) is a List of cities in Chile, city and Communes of Chile, commune in southern Chile and capital of Osorno Province in the Los Lagos Region. It had a population of 145,475, as of the 2002 census. It i ...
, a small diocese with 23 parishes, on 10 January 2015. Local protests and candlelight vigils and a petition to the papal nuncio on the part of 30 priests and deacons of the diocese were unsuccessful in blocking Barros' appointment, as was a letter signed by 51 members of the National Congress National Congress is a term used in the names of various political parties and legislatures.
Political parties
*Ethiopia: Oromo National Congress, original name of the Oromo People's Congress
*Guyana: People's National Congress Reform
*India:
**In ...
. In 2018 Francis ordered a new investigation, and in April a 2,300-page report provided all the evidence he needed to remove Barros—and to recognize that he had been given bad advice on the case. Francis reversed his position, apologizing to victims of abuse, and undertaking a wholesale review of the Church in Chile.
When Francis met with 34 Chilean bishops in May 2018, he asked the bishops to review the state of the Church and the root causes of the crisis. The Karadima case and that of the bishops associated with him were seen as part of a broader corrupt and self-serving culture. Francis described the need to deepen their review to "the sexual abuse of minors, of the abuses of power, and of the abuses of conscience". He identified the bishops with "the psychology of the elite" that "ends by generating dynamics of division, separation, closed circles that result in a narcissistic and authoritarian spirituality" and warned that "Messianism, elitism and clericalism are all symptoms of this perversion in a way of being church." At the conclusion, all the active bishops and auxiliaries submitted their resignations in writing. Barros's and Valenzuela's were among the resignations which Pope Francis accepted.
By July 2018, Arteaga and Maroevic, whose resignations were not yet accepted, were not listed on Bishop-Accountability.org as being accused of any cover-up. However, Errázuriz still was listed.
In 2018, a 2009 email which Errázuriz wrote to then-Apostolic Nuncio to Chile, Archbishop Giuseppe Pinto, and which was made public during the lawsuit, revealed Errázuriz's role in covering up growing allegations of sexual abuse against Karadima. "The presentation of the allegations to the promotor of justice normally calms the aggression of the accusers," Errázuriz wrote. "With respect to F. Karadima I didn’t ask the promotor to interrogate him; I only asked Monsignor Andrés Arteaga for his opinion. He considered everything absolutely implausible. Since this was about facts that had prescribed ast the statute of limitations I closed the investigation. That’s how I chose to protect them, conscious that the way I acted, if the accusers at some point brought the case to the media, it would turn against me."
A complaint which was filed on October 25, 2018, by three victims of Karadima named Errázuriz as the leader of the coverup of acts of sexual abuse committed by the former priest. The complaint also named Ezzati, Pinto, Arteaga, and Chilean Minister of the Court of Appeals Juan Manuel Muñoz as witnesses to it as well.
Assessments
Antonio Delfau, a Jesuit priest in Santiago, said in 2011 that the Vatican decision on Karadima's guilt "is going to mark a before and after in the way the Chilean Catholic Church proceeds in cases like these, or at least it should", and "From now on, every case of sexual abuse must be treated with meticulous care and not be based on the gut feeling of a given church official." Chilean political analyst , Dean of the Journalism School of the Adolfo Ibáñez University
The Adolfo Ibáñez University () (UAI) is a private research university in Santiago, Chile associated with the Adolfo Ibáñez Foundation. In 1988, in accordance with new educational legislation, a university was founded based on the Valparaiso ...
, called the Karadima case "the worst scandal of the Chilean Catholic Church". He said: "The abuses were not possible without a network of political, social and religious power working for 50 years. The assassination of René Schneider
René Schneider Chereau ( ; December 31, 1913 – October 25, 1970) was a Chilean military official who served as commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army at the time of the 1970 Chilean presidential election, when he was assassinated during a ...
... bears traces of the network". He said that "Karadima built a parallel church in the 1980s and 1990s to satisfy a very specific sector of Santiago's society. This para-church 'paraiglesia''was the platform of the prevailing positions that damaged the prestige of the institution since 2000".
Laicization of Karadima
On 28 September 2018, Pope Francis
Pope Francis (born Jorge Mario Bergoglio; 17 December 1936 – 21 April 2025) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 13 March 2013 until Death and funeral of Pope Francis, his death in 2025. He was the fi ...
laicized Karadima. It is believed that he lived in a care home
Care may refer to:
Organizations and projects
* CARE (New Zealand), Citizens Association for Racial Equality, a former New Zealand organisation
* CARE (England) West Midlands, Central Accident Resuscitation Emergency team, a team of doctors & ...
in Santiago.
Archdiocese of Santiago lawsuit
On 21 October 2018, it was reported that Chile's Court of Appeal ordered the office of Santiago's Archbishop to pay 450 million pesos ($650,000) to three men who stated that Karadima sexually abused them for decades. The three claimants in this lawsuit against the Archdiocese were James Hamilton, José Andrés Murillo and Juan Carlos Cruz, who was one of Karadima's most high-profile victims. Dobra Lusic, the President of the Court of Appeals, stated on October 22 that the lawsuit was still ongoing and that no verdict has been reached. On 27 March 2019, the Court of Appeals ordered the Archdiocese to pay 100 million pesos (about US$147,000) for "moral damages" to each of the survivors: Juan Carlos Cruz, José Andrés Murillo and James Hamilton. The ruling was confirmed by their lawyer Juan Pablo Hermosilla and Santiago Bishop Celestino Aos on March 28. It was announced that Errázuriz was named as a defendant in an ongoing investigation and had testified before prosecutors.
Errázuriz Resignation From Council of Cardinals
On 1 November 2018, it was revealed that Cruz, Hamilton and Murillo had filed a complaint against Errázuriz on October 25 which accused him of perjury in the civil suit for compensation for damages filed against the Archdiocese of Santiago. On 15 November 2018, Errázuriz announced that he was no longer a member of the Council of Cardinals
The Council of Cardinals (, , ; also called C9 because it contained nine cardinal members for a time) or Council of Cardinal Advisers is a group of cardinals of the Catholic Church appointed by Pope Francis to serve as his advisers. The counci ...
, which serves as the Pope's advisory committee,[
] claiming that Pope Francis accepted his resignation after serving the Vatican's five-year term limit. However, it has been acknowledged that just as Errázuriz announced his resignation, a Chilean prosecutor announced that he had been summoned to testify.
Investigation of Diego Ossa
In January 2019, the Vatican opened a criminal investigation against Karadima's "right-hand man" Diego Ossa, removed from ministry in August 2018 after being accused of committing two acts of sex abuse and covering up acts of sex abuse committed in 2005. Ossa faced three counts of sexual and power abuse. Ossa, who served in the El Señor de Renca parish and was later named as vicar in a Ñuñoa parish, died in April 2020 of pancreatic cancer before a verdict could be reached in the Vatican. News of his death received mixed reaction from his complainants. By the time of his death, the Vatican investigation against Ossa also revealed an email between Cardinal Errázuriz and Ossa where Errázuriz agreed to transfer to him settlement money so he could pay off one of his complainants, Óscar Osbén. On 16 April 2020, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith posthumously found Ossa guilty of sexual abuse and of abuse of conscience of another of his followers and in death, gave him a symbolic sentence of five years of deprivation of all ecclesiastical office.
Notes
See also
* Catholic sexual abuse cases in Chile
References
;Additional resources
*
External links
*
Key Dates in the Chilean Sex Abuse Scandal
2 May 2018 (Associated Press)
{{Catholic Church sexual abuse cases
Political scandals in Chile
Child sexual abuse in Chile
2011 in Chile
2011 in Christianity
Catholic priests convicted of child sexual abuse
Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals in Chile