On Saturday, the Vatican announced that the pope had appointed Monsignor Víctor Manuel Fernández, Archbishop of La Plata, Argentina, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Vatican body whose mission is to promote and safeguard Catholic doctrine. His duties include handling sexual abuse complaints filed against clergy.
BishopAccountability.org, a 20-year-old organization in Massachusetts that maintains an online archive of abuses in the Catholic Church, said in a statement that in 2019, the prelate refused to believe victims who accused a priest in the Archdiocese of La Plata for sexually abusing children.
Francisco “made a shocking and concerning decision,” the group said in an emailed statement late on Saturday in the United States, citing Fernández’s handling of the case.
“In his response to the allegations, he strongly supported the accused priest and refused to believe the victims,” BishopAccountability.org said. Fernández “should have been investigated, not promoted to one of the highest positions in the world church.”
Calls and emails sent to the La Plata archdiocese office went unanswered on Sunday.
As prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the 60-year-old archbishop, who will take up his Vatican post in September, “will have immense power, especially when it comes to judging and punishing priests who abuse children.” , noted BishopAccountability.org.
A trusted adviser to the pontiff, Fernández has been nicknamed the “pope’s theologian” because he is believed to have helped draft some of Francis’ most important documents. The Pope appointed him at the head of the Archdiocese of La Plata in 2018.
BishopAccountablity.org said that after a 2008 child abuse complaint against a La Plata parish priest resurfaced in 2019, the archbishop posted a letter from the priest on the archdiocese’s website. In it, the cleric denied the accusation of abuse and said that he had been slandered.
The archbishop later went to the accused priest’s parish and celebrated Mass with him, according to BishopAccountability.org.
Despite more accusations surfacing, Fernández allowed the priest to continue working. The archbishop eventually removed him, saying the priest requested to leave for “health reasons.” In December 2019, the priest took his own life hours after a judge issued a warrant for his arrest, according to the watchdog group and Argentine media reports at the time.
“Nothing in his performance suggests that he is fit to lead the pope’s battle against abuse and cover-up,” BishopAccountability.org said of Fernández.
Francis has promised that the Catholic Church will adhere to a zero-tolerance policy on clergy sexual abuse.
FUENTE: Associated Press
