The appointment of lawyer José Ugaz as defense for the priest and the 85-day delay in removing the accused from his duties put the Primate of Peru under the scrutiny of justice.
A judge from the 21st Preparatory Investigation Court of Lima rejected the prosecutor’s request for 9 months of preventive detention against priest Marco Agüero for the crime of touching, acts of sexual connotation, or lewd acts.
In the hearing, the presence of the renowned lawyer José Ugaz was surprising, who, on behalf of the Archdiocese of Lima, defended the priest friend of Cardinal Carlos Castillo.
It is striking that Dr. Ugaz, after having represented six victims in the Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana case, finds himself today on the opposite side. While his previous work was commendable, his current decision to defend the aggressor generates an inevitable contradiction: what are we to make of this? One wonders if the compensation he would receive from Castillo’s archdiocese is simply closer to his economic expectations than that from the Sodalicio.
But in this case, what is being sought? Is it Ugaz’s expertise or his skill in shielding Castillo’s reputation? The insistence on this hire suggests that the Archbishop of Lima has reasons to be concerned about what Agüero might say or the content of the conversations on the seized cell phone (what dialogues might there be?). Of course, silence and strategy have a price: knowing Ugaz’s track record, the cost to the Archdiocese’s coffers will undoubtedly be monumental.
The truth is that the complaint from five women against this priest has exposed the little empathy of the Church of Lima with the victims and the authoritarian system that has been installed in the Archdiocese of Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo: “For my friends, mercy and silence; for the others, the rigor of the law”.
In addition, the Archdiocese of Lima’s response, on Friday, March 6, through a statement, was not only late but contradictory, full of fallacies that only seek to justify the unjustifiable.
What is worse: in the framework of the «month of the woman,» the Archbishop of Lima, Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio, has said absolutely nothing about the issue, not even on his radio program on Saturdays. He has preferred silence and the complicity of journalist Fernando Carvallo from RPP (Radio Programas del Perú) to say nothing. On other occasions, he would have lacked the tongue… it’s that now it’s his friend who is harmed… Do the women who denounced the priest not deserve a response from their shepherd?
For now, the Public Ministry, the Peruvian State entity in charge of investigating crimes, has appealed the judge’s decision and hopes that, within the deadlines, justice will reconsider the request. In the meantime, Agüero will remain free, he will not be able to approach the complainants, and he must report to the court every 30 days.
But who is Marco Agüero?
Priest Marco Agüero has been a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) since 1987. He has a master’s degree in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical and Civil Faculty of Theology of Lima. He was trained at the Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo Seminary and was sent to the PUCP to teach theology by the then Cardinal Augusto Vargas Alzamora. There he met Carlos Castillo, where they forged a friendship that has lasted decades.
After a journey through various dioceses, first in Chosica and then in Lurín, he returned to Lima at the express request of Cardinal Castillo, presumably with an eye on an auxiliary bishopric.
The facts speak for themselves
The facts that put Agüero in the public eye include a serious complaint: five women, including three minors, accuse the diocesan priest of improper touching in the sacrament of confession, considered a very serious offense in the Catholic Church. But what is worse is that this exploitation would have begun at a spiritual retreat.
According to the complaint, everything happened in the Parish of Our Lady of Joy, in the San Borja district, a lively community full of faith that, with the effort of all the faithful, has an important space in the Archdiocese of Lima.
The friend of the Primate Cardinal, Marco Agüero, was known for his strange character and for problems in other dioceses. Despite this, Carlos Castillo incardinated him in Lima with all rights and duties, and then sent him to work in parishes.
It didn’t take long for the first problems to appear, first with the San Ricardo parish in La Victoria, a popular district with many needs. There, Marco Agüero expelled some nuns who for decades had supported children and the poor in the community, perhaps because they lived too close and saw how he got drunk with the now newly ordained priest Yadir Candela.
The people could no longer stand it and soon rose up and demanded his change from the archbishop. Castillo had no choice but to remove him from La Victoria and, despite the background, sent him to San Borja.
Pilate’s statement
Although the scandal reached its boiling point last Tuesday, March 3—when the parents of the minors, exhausted by the indifference, decided to confront the priest in his own parish—the Archdiocese of Lima took its time. True to that parsimony they confuse with prudence, they reacted two days after the scandal with a statement so contradictory that it seems designed to generate more shadows than light.
The first thing that stands out is that they acknowledge their own inaction by confirming the receipt of complaints of non-consensual touching in the sacred realm of confession against priest Marco Agüero on December 11 at 13:55.
However, in a play on words, they say that the annexes were missing and conveniently omit the name of the official who received the documentation, assuring that the information went to the “Listening Commission,” which apparently suffers from seasonal deafness.
Between the Christmas panettone and summer vacations, the statement claims that Cardinal Castillo would have imposed a “formal penal remedy” of which no one could give an account. And that the “concerned” cardinal established an investigation commission that never called the complainants and that remained blind to the crime, deaf to the clamor, and above all, mute before justice.
It is outrageous that, while current protocols require the immediate suspension of any cleric under suspicion, Marco Agüero continued in his functions as if nothing had happened until March 3, the day the scandal exploded. That is, the priest was not removed from his duties by the synodal Church of “listening” that Castillo so preaches, but by the police.
It took almost 85 days of sepulchral silence before the curia lifted a finger, demonstrating that for Castillo the “precautionary measure” is an elastic concept that stretches according to the closeness of the implicated.
The double standard and the forgetting of the victims
The lawyer for the complainants, Valeria Cabrera, has been scathing: no representative of the Archdiocese approached the victims. There was no will to investigate, only to manage reputational damage. She also stated that the Archdiocese, if it had had the will to consider the first complaints, would have removed the priest from his duties in December last year.
It seems that not even Pope Leo’s mandate in the last ad limina visit—asking for a united Church focused on its faithful—managed to sink in with the Archbishop of Lima. Nor does the recent and firm reminder from the Holy Father to the bishops of the world seem to have made an impression on these cases: “Listening to the victims is an act of justice and truth. Reparation, in the Church, cannot be separated from mercy or respect for the law, but neither can it be reduced only to them. It requires a clear ecclesial vision, founded in truth…”. In this scenario, the question is inevitable: where does that truth fit in the current strategy of the Church of Lima?
Here, ideological labels or tales of “instrumentalization” preached by some out there have no place. Here we talk about flagrant omissions, which within the canonical framework have a protocol and in Lima are only applied to those Castillo considers his enemies.
Castillo’s favorites
However, the facts end up setting the tone. The list of Castillo’s “favorites” with open files begins to look like a procession: Marco Agüero joins today that of Nilton Zárate and the former rector of the Santo Toribio Seminary, Luis Sarmiento, who—in a twist worthy of a mystery novel—today “studies” in Rome after being accused by his own seminarians.
The bad tongues say that in the House of the Clergy (the famous “Siberia”) there are more skeletons in the closet waiting their turn to come to light; we’ll have to ask César Mesinas what other secrets the cold of that house keeps.
However, this case ends up exposing the double moral of those who have positioned themselves, for years, as the moral guardians of the vulnerable. The silence of journalists Paola Ugaz, Pedro Salinas, and Rosa María Palacios is not only strange; it is deafening. Apparently, indignation has ideological filters and justice is only demanded when the cause comes with compensation; but when the pointed finger is “the friend of the friend,” ethics is put in a drawer and the voice of the victims is silenced. For them, coherence ends where loyalty to the group begins… thank God that Pope Leo knows them very well.