There was a time when Spanish Jesuits sent problematic priests to Bolivia as if throwing garbage far from home. Bolivia functioned as an ecclesiastical dump: accused priests who did not disappear, but were relocated to poor and indigenous parishes where no one asked too many questions and where the victims would never have access to Rome, to international journalists, or to canonical offices with pressure capacity. Decades later, when those victims began to speak, they discovered something as obscene as the abuses: that their pain barely existed for the institution that claimed to want to listen to it.
That pattern has not disappeared. In the current Ibero-American ecclesial world, an uncomfortable perception is beginning to consolidate: not all victims are treated equally, nor do all cases activate the same response system. And the most disturbing thing is that the difference does not seem theological or legal, but racial.
The victims of the Sodalicio, generally descendants of Europeans and from a high social stratum in Peru, have received an extraordinary institutional deployment: papal envoys, specific commissions, direct interlocution with Rome, international media pressure, and an architecture of care that is difficult to find in other cases. No one disputes here the gravity of what they denounced or the legitimacy of their recognition. The problem arises when comparing it to the other side of the system.
While some cases activate maximum intensity mechanisms, others barely generate administrative silence.
Indigenous and mestizo victims from poor dioceses in countries like Bolivia and Peru have been sending writings to Rome for years without obtaining an effective response. In many cases, not even an acknowledgment of receipt. Literally, nothing. There is no stable channel, no follow-up, no visible structure of interlocution, and under the shelter of a supposed secrecy in the instruction, justice has not been done in many heartbreaking cases.
As InfoVaticana has been reporting, in Chiclayo, three women denounced with a very solid and verifiable account before Robert Prevost abuses suffered when they were girls by diocesan priests. Years later, the procedures continue without effective reparation or clear closure. The files advance at an unpredictable pace, when they advance. And in between, the victims live with the sensation that the system is not designed for them. They have reduced their abuser to the lay state (and his canon lawyer), and now what, if your abuser is a layperson, does reparation no longer apply?, does that criterion apply to Figari’s victims?
In Huacho, the complaints against Bishop Antonio Santarsiero – until a few weeks ago Secretary General of the Peruvian Episcopal Conference – for alleged sexual abuses and psychological maltreatment were forwarded to the Pope and the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith through formal communications and a notarial letter delivered to the Apostolic Nunciature. However, the institutional response is not on record: neither acknowledgment of receipt, nor communication, nor formal opening notified to the complainants. A bishop accused in a consistent and solid testimony of forcing fellatio on a seminarian will proceed to celebrate priestly ordinations in the coming weeks. And the victims? to date, they have not only not received a single paper, but they have been publicly pointed out in a meeting with multiple priests.
The detail that makes the comparison unbearable
If one places one panorama next to the other, the difference is not one of nuance. In one case, the entire ecclesial apparatus mobilizes: there are meetings, there are statements, there are trips, there are journalists, there are Roman offices attentive to the detail. In the other, there is nothing. Not a letter. Not a call. Not even the mechanical, almost administrative, procedure of confirming that the writing has reached its destination.
The victims of the Sodalicio belong, in their great majority, to a very specific social profile: white, affluent, Limeño families, with surnames, with university education, with natural access to journalists, to lawyers, and to bishops. They are legitimate victims, and their cause is just. But they are also victims that the institution knows how to read, because they speak its same cultural language: that of urban Catholicism.
The other victims do not fit into that map. The Bolivian victims, those from Chiclayo, people of modest origin, with no more capital than their testimony. The victims from the minor seminary of Huacho are seminarians and former seminarians from the province, without a media structure to back them up. They are faithful whose social and ethnic extraction does not generate, by itself, any institutional reflection in Rome. Their denunciation, no matter how solid, does not produce movement. Where are we going to get resources to compensate for the damage inflicted on them? From the Sodalicio’s patrimony it seems not, since as Jordi Bertomeu explains, the Sodalicio’s patrimony will not compensate all the victims of the Church but only the victims of the Sodalicio. If they abused you in the highlands of the diocese of Chiclayo or in the seminary of Huacho, tough luck. There are only resources for those abused by rich institutions. What absurd criterion is that?
That correlation — white and affluent victim, institutional response; mestizo or indigenous victim, silence — is repeating with such regularity that it is no longer honest to continue treating it as a coincidence. The Code of Canon Law is, in this point, brutally clear. Canon 208 proclaims the fundamental equality of all the faithful. Canon 221 recognizes to any faithful the right to claim and defend their rights in the competent ecclesiastical forum. The acceptio personarum — the acceptance of persons, the preferential treatment for reasons of origin, wealth, or influence — is expressly prohibited in the canonical tradition from its origins, and the Gospel itself reproves it in especially harsh terms when it appears in the Letter of James.
But Canon Law, like any law, is worth what its concrete applications are worth. And what is being applied today in Roman practice — not in the texts, but in the facts — is an implicit hierarchy of victims. There are first-class victims, whose letters are answered, whose representatives are received, whose cases generate apostolic visitors. And there are second-class victims, whose letters pile up unopened, whose lawyers are ignored or file-bound, whose cases sleep in drawers that no one has any interest in stirring.
The most painful thing is that this hierarchy is not decreed or proclaimed. It works by omission. No one signs a circular saying «attend preferentially to white and affluent victims.» They simply attend to those, and the others wait. They wait months, they wait years, they wait for someone with a known surname to take an interest in their case for something to move. They wait for an international journalist to notice them. They wait for a traveling cardinal to mention them in passing in some conference. They wait for chance to reproduce, in their favor, the selective logic of the system.