A case study in how the Vatican’s abuse reform efforts have failed

ROME – Nearly 25 years after the explosion of clerical abuse scandals in the United States spurred a new “zero tolerance” attitude and almost six years after Pope Francis’s global safeguarding summit and the issuance of a swath of new norms, the question arises: Has any of it been effective?

Members of the pope’s safeguarding commission in presenting their first annual global report on safeguarding efforts around the world Oct. 29 were optimistic, arguing that in the 12 years since its establishment, despite a deeply entrenched culture at times resistant to change, progress was being made.

However, the case of Carlos (a false name), who alleges that he was sexually abused by a priest and spiritual advisor in Toledo from the age of 14-16, raises serious questions about just how effective these measures have been, especially in the application to concrete cases.

These questions intensified after Pope Francis on Nov. 7 met with a group of seminarians from the ecclesial province of Toledo, greeting several clerics and hierarchs whom Carlos says helped cover up for his abuser, and who testified against him during a civil trial.

After making a first complaint to the Archdiocese of Toledo in 2009 and visiting various Vatican offices to deliver damning documents and evidence and to demand action not only against his abuser, but also those who he says covered up, Carlos says no action has been taken.

Although Crux was unable to independently verify all of Carlos’s claims, the odyssey he has embarked on over the past 15 years illustrates the Kafkaesque dynamic that survivors often face when attempting to provoke action on such cases.

Grooming and abuse

Speaking to Crux, Carlos said he entered the minor seminary Santo Tomás de Villanueva in Toledo in 2004 at the age of 12 feeling an ardent call to the priesthood. However, when he became the victim of relentless bullying and harassment from other students, he turned to his confessor and spiritual director, Father Pedro Francisco Rodríguez Ramos, for support.

“He became my only person of trust,” Carlos said, saying Rodríguez Ramos from that point began a slow grooming process that began with small moments of physical contact, such as a caress on the cheek, holding his hand, and squeezing it during Confession.

This escalated to kisses on the mouth that were justified as normal, then more explicit touching and, ultimately, rape.

At one point the emotional toll of the bullying and the confusion Carlos felt over what was starting to happen with Rodríguez Ramos led him to begin cutting himself before attempting suicide.

Carlos said he eventually abandoned the seminary, and it took years before he confided what happened in confession, due to feelings of intense guilt.

He said the priest urged him to seek psychological help, which focused less on the abuse and more on the issue of homosexuality. Months later, Carlos said he discovered the priest he confessed to, and the therapist recommended to him, were close friends of his abuser.

He finally told his parents what happened in 2009, after which he and his mother began a years-long process of attempting to sound the alarm in both Toledo and Rome that he says has ultimately gone nowhere.

Sounding the local alarm

Carlos said the first person in the church to be told about his abuse was a priest who is now an auxiliary bishop that his family had known for years, and who apparently brought the matter to the then-archbishop of Toledo, Braulio Rodríguez Plaza, in 2009, but provided no follow up or guidance on potential next steps.

That priest now serves as an auxiliary bishop in a diocese near Toledo and has been named by Carlos in a canonical complaint delivered to the Vatican.

Carlos’s mother spoke with Rodríguez Plaza herself in March 2010, with the bishop saying the allegations of abuse sounded strange, and that, “we’ll pray for him,” meaning Carlos.

From that point, it appears no action was taken, Carlos said, saying he was never informed of whether a diocesan investigation into his allegations was made, and if so, what the result was.

From 2010 until June 2015, according to archdiocesan records, Rodríguez Ramos maintained his position at the Toledo minor seminary, and was therefore in regular contact with minors, even though diocesan leadership had already been informed of the abuse.

In July 2015, Rodríguez Ramos was appointed rector of the church of San Ildefonso in Toledo, and in September 2020 he was appointed by Cerro as a member of the archdiocesan vicariate for clergy in Toledo.

The church’s failure to act against Rodríguez Ramos prompted Carlos to pursue civil justice, filing a civil complaint against Rodríguez Ramos in June 2016.

The priest was found guilty in October 2023 and sentenced to seven years in prison, ordered to pay a fine of 40,000 euros ($42,190) in compensation to Carlos, and prohibited from coming within 250 meters of him.

However, Rodríguez Ramos appealed the verdict and in February 2024 was acquitted on grounds that the failure to have an expert vet the complaint during the preliminary investigation and the absence of his lawyer in the presenting of evidence harmed the priest’s defense.

Carlos has appealed the acquittal, and the case is currently before Spain’s Supreme Court, with the Supreme Court prosecutor’s office pushing for the original verdict to be upheld.

In a statement over the summer, the prosecutor said, “the examination of the trial sentence places us before a complete, integral evaluation of the evidence proposed in which all parties, therefore also the defense, were able to question as many witnesses and experts as they were interested in.”

“Therefore, it does not seem that there was any lack of contradiction and therefore of defenselessness,” it said.

Despite the civil trial and initial guilty verdict of Rodríguez Ramos, and after his mother’s 2010 complaint, Carlos said the church did not take any restrictive measures against the priest until 2021.

The current archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Cerro also sent Rodríguez Ramos on a mission trip to Moyobamba, Peru in 2020 in which he was in contact with minors, four years after Carlos made his complaint to Spanish civil authorities.

Carlos’s case went public in an article in Spanish newspaper El Pais in April 2021, and he believes that it was only in response to media pressure that Cerro imposed restrictions on Rodríguez Ramos and issued a statement saying that an internal procedure had been conducted, with the presumption of innocence.

However, Carlos said no one contacted him or his family, and they were unaware that any procedure had been conducted, or what it entailed.

“No one told me anything,” he said. “They affirm that the canonical process was initiated, but no one asked me anything. And, in addition, during the trial the priest who abused me confirms the archdiocese knew it since 2010,” he said.

It wasn’t until late 2022, he said, that he finally got a call from a diocesan representative for abuse prevention in Toledo, days after the then-secretary general of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, César García Magán, who is how auxiliary bishop of Toledo, was questioned about the inaction of the church on Carlos’s case during a press conference.

From March 2010, when his mother first spoke with Rodríguez Plaza, until that phone call in 2022, “there was no help for me or my family as a victim, only continuous attempts to discredit us,” Carlos said, saying “it took them twelve years to do anything, and only after my case got attention in the media.”

Action in Rome

Carlos has also sought to sound the alarm in Rome over the apparent coverup of his abuse by ecclesial authorities in Toledo, specifically accusing Rodríguez Plaza, Cerro, and García Magán of coverup in their roles as authorities in the Toledo archdiocese.

Carlos, who has kept all of the documents, which Crux has seen, to chronicle his actions, first went to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) in December 2022 and delivered documents relevant to his case. He went again in January 2023 to follow up but received no response.

He went back to the DDF two months later, in March 2023, to deliver another letter to the then-prefect, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, which he did not receive an answer to. However, Carlos said he got “continuous calls” over the next two days from one of the bishops he denounced, but refused to respond, and reported those calls to the DDF, but received no response.

Fed up with the lack of action, Carlos said he went to the DDF again in April 2023 to file a formal complaint against Cerro for coverup.

Around the same time, in May 2023, he said, his civil trial began and various priests from the Toledo ecclesial province, including the now-rector of the Seminary of San Ildefonso of Toledo, testified in favor of his abuser.

In September 2023 Carlos again traveled to Rome to meet with members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (PCPM) and to file a complaint with them. He met with the commission leadership, including its president, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, again a month later to discuss further steps regarding the inaction of the Roman curia with his case.

After that meeting, in which he said he was encouraged to present complaints in other Vatican dicasteries, Carlos delivered formal complaints of coverup to the Vatican Dicasteries for Bishops and for Clergy, as well as the Secretariat of State, which Crux has seen. He is still awaiting a response.

Carlos has also written to Pope Francis on several occasions, sending at least one letter in 2022 and four more missives in 2023 providing various details about his case, and denouncing the lack of action on the part of ecclesial authorities, both in Toledo and in Rome.

He said he met Pope Francis in December 2023 to discuss his case, and that they have stayed in touch ever since.

During their meetings, Carlos said he has handed over his various complaints and provided evidence of the apparent abuse and coverup to Pope Francis himself, since “my experience, so far, has taught me that a victim and survivor cannot trust in Church offices or dicasteries.”

Questioning ecclesial norms

Lamenting the church’s continual failure to act over the past 15 years, Carlos said, “my abuser and the people covering up stole God and my vocation to the priesthood from me.”

“But now the lack of action in the Roman curia adds further dramatic consequences,” he said.

He said church norms imposed by Pope Francis to crack down on coverup such as his 2016 edict Come una madre amorevole, which outlined procedures to remove a bishop from office for negligence or coverup in abuse cases, and his 2019 law Vos estis lux mundi, enforcing mandatory reporting to ecclesial authorities, among other things, have not been applied in his case.

“My case demonstrates how, even with access to evidence and the ability to prove the coverup, some in the Vatican prefer not to do anything and exhaust victims and survivors in an eternal labyrinth characterized by no news about the process,” Carlos said.

“Vos estis lux mundi and Come una madre amorevole don’t work and they make victims waste their time and energy. In fact, I feel like that’s the purpose of some part of the Vatican hierarchy, to exhaust victims and protect the institution,” Carlos said, saying he is getting impatient in waiting for justice that never seems to come.

When Pope Francis rolled these measures out, and when he lifted the rule of “pontifical secrecy” in clerical sexual abuse cases, making it easier to cooperate with civil authorities, they were hailed as significant steps forward.

However, nearly eight years after Come una madre amorevole and five years after Vos estis lux mundi, Carlos’s case proves that these measures are still a major work in progress, and that far from making the process more user-friendly, the result has not been friendly at all.

On Nov. 7 Pope Francis met with seminarians and authorities from the ecclesiastical province of Toledo, which includes several different dioceses. Among them were Cerro and some of the individuals who testified against Carlos during the civil trial.

After seeing pictures of Pope Francis shaking hands with these men, Carlos sent another complaint to the Vatican lamenting the agonizing journey that victims and their families are often subject to when seeking ecclesial justice.

“Some of the people who failed to protect me or listen to me, and that even tried to discredit me during the trial met Pope Francis. I have formally denounced it to Pope Francis,” he said.

Given the Vatican’s lack of action on his case thus far, and in the wake of the pope’s meeting with Cerro and those who spoke out against him, despite the pope’s personal interest in his case and his encouragement to keep fighting, Carlos said he does not expect anything to change.

“It has been years of inaction, and handing over evidence shows the inefficiency of the system when there is no follow up,” he said, saying he wants justice not only as a matter of principle, but also to help him to find his way back to the God that “these people claim to represent.”

“I am still waiting for the canonical process to start. Nothing has happened, nothing. It’s not that it hasn’t been resolved. I haven’t even been notified,” he said, saying, “I feel that the inaction of every instance in the Catholic church is keeping me, and other survivors, in a spiritual abyss. Is this the Vatican’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy we always hear about in the media?”

Neither the archdiocese of Toledo nor the Vatican have responded to requests for comment for this article.

Follow Elise Ann Allen on X: @eliseannallen