MEXICO CITY (AP) — Former Mexican priest Fernando Martínez, a member of the Legionaries of Christ whose clerical status was withdrawn by the Catholic Church in 2020 after finding him guilty of various crimes of sexual abuse against minors, died Monday in southern Mexico. Italy at age 84, the congregation reported.
The Vatican found Martínez guilty of the abuse, but he never faced civil justice despite the fact that his own congregation issued a document at the end of 2019 detailing the sexual abuse had begun in Mexico City in 1969 and continued until the 1990s.
The last known cases against Martínez were those of sexual abuse of girls between the ages of 6 and 9 at the Cumbres Institute in the city of Cancun, in southeastern Mexico.
“He died unpunished,” lamented Monday Ana Lucía Salazar, one of his victims, who as an adult has raised her voice against cases of priestly sexual abuse. In an interview with the AP in 2020, Salazar said that while some of the minors read the Bible, others were raped in front of them, but there were never any consequences despite the complaints.
Salazar, who is a television presenter and mother of three children, criticized the fact that Martínez died unpunished and “covered up” by his superiors “until the last day.”
Although he could not exercise the priesthood, he continued to belong to the Legionaries and therefore to the Church, which caused outrage among his victims.
“There was never justice and truth for more than 50 years of rape of children and adolescents. He raped in schools and the Mexican State protected him,” Salazar wrote.
The Legionaries of Christ order was founded in Mexico by Marcial Maciel in 1941 and has been the subject of allegations of abuse for decades. In 2010, with Maciel deceased, the Vatican imposed a reform process after an investigation revealed that its founder had created a system of power based on sexual abuse, silence, deception and obedience, which allowed him to lead a double life “devoid of scruples and of authentic religious sense”.
In December 2019, the Legionaries released a report identifying 33 priests and 71 seminarians who have sexually abused minors over the past eight decades. A third of those named, including Martínez himself, were in turn victims of Maciel.
Martínez’s case is not the only one in which the abuser dies before justice is done.
At the end of April, the biggest clerical pedophilia scandal in Bolivia came to light, after it was revealed that the Spanish Jesuit Alfonso Pedrajas, who died in 2009, had left a diary in which he confessed to having abused dozens of minors during the 1970s and 1980s.
Since the issue was disclosed, three Bolivian priests have been arrested in that country, but victims’ associations say there could be many more involved and continue to demand action from the Church.
