“Alfonso Pedrajas: Confessions of a Jesuit Child Molester and the Catholic Church’s Cover-Up”

Pedrajas’ diary is full of confessions about child sexual abuse and violence. ‘I was still in Miraflores (a neighborhood in Lima, red.) when I made my first mistake’, he writes in April 1964 during his stay in Lima. Decades later, on February 21, 1998, during his stay in Bolivia, the Spanish missionary wrote these words: ‘The weight of all my mistakes crushes me. Yes, I am guilty. I have caused suffering.’

From 1960, when Pedrajas entered the Jesuit order, through 2008, one year before his death, the Spanish missionary wrote 383 pages of personal reflections and accounts of episodes in his life. In his diary he hardly ever goes into detail about his actions, which he describes as ‘sins’, ‘mistakes’ or part of an ‘disease’.

Born in Valencia, ‘Padre Pica’, as Pedrajas would later be called by his students, joined the Jesuits at the age of 17, the largest religious order in the Catholic Church with more than 16,000 members. Shortly afterwards he left for Latin America. He spent his time in several Jesuit schools in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. He stayed in the latter country by far the longest. He taught underprivileged young people in Catholic doctrine.

Alfonso Pedrajas’ cousin Fernando Pedrajas found the missionary’s diary in an attic room in Madrid at the end of last year. While cleaning, he came across a cardboard box containing his uncle Alfonso’s printed diary pages. While reading, Fernando Pedrajas made a shocking discovery: his uncle was a pedophile. “I hurt so many people (85?). Too much’, were the words in the diary that Fernando read with horror. The number 85 turned out to be an estimate of the number of children his uncle Alfonso had abused during his lifetime.

Many lives destroyed

In the interests of the victims and fearing that the diary of his uncle ‘Padre Pica’ would be buried inside the Catholic Church, Fernando Pedrajas decided to contact The country. The Spanish-language newspaper took the case very seriously and managed to locate and speak to five victims. “Many lives have been destroyed,” one of them says. ‘Padre Pica had many positive qualities and did a lot of good work. But what he did to those hundreds of children erases all that good work.”

The found diary is exceptional in several respects. For example, cases involving sexual violence rarely come to light through confessions of the perpetrator. More often they are retold by the traumatized victims. It is also a unique insight into the psyche of a pedophile who is tormented by his own actions; Alfonso Pedrajas’ confessions are accompanied by regrets and bubbling feelings of guilt.

The diary entries are also groundbreaking in that they clearly demonstrate the extent to which the Catholic Church tolerated and covered up sexual abuse of minors. Pedrajas consulted the Jesuit order several times for advice about his pedophile urges and the abuses he committed.

Top of the Vatican

“I’ve told it so many times,” he writes. Not once was he suspended or subjected to a psychological examination. Instead, he was coolly advised against continuing his harmful actions.

The diary shows that at least seven of Pedrajas’s provincial superiors plus a dozen Bolivian and Spanish clergy looked away after he confessed to the abuse. One of them was Marcos Recolons, a Jesuit who eventually rose to the top of the Vatican.

Recolons, a Catalan missionary, was partly responsible for the expulsion of Pedro Lima, an ex-Jesuit from Bolivia who was expelled from the order after he denounced the sexual abuse of Alfonso Pedrajas, among others. ‘I will not allow you to speak ill of my Jesuit brothers,’ Recolons is said to have made clear to Lima.

revelations of The Boston Globe in 2002 about the covering up of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church in the US, sparked a wave of publications worldwide about similar cases. Latin America, where the Catholic Church has traditionally been quite dominant, also has its scandals.

Moral authority

One of the most notorious scandals is that of the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel, who turned out to lead a double life during the second half of the last century. Maciel abused countless children and adolescents. He also appeared to have fathered several children. And then there was the case of Fernando Karadima, a Chilean pastor who sexually and mentally abused children in the 1980s and 1990s. Both scandals sent shock waves through Latin America. Many perceived these revelations as an attack on the moral authority and credibility of the Catholic Church.

And now there is the diary of Alfonso ‘Padre Pica’ Pedrajas that is causing a lot in Bolivia. On social media and through street protests, people are expressing their outrage and calling for justice.

The Bolivian attorney general announced last week that he would launch a large-scale investigation into sexual abuse and cover-up practices within the church in his country. “This is not an isolated case,” he said The country. “There must be a deterrent criminal sanction that will once and for all deal with the systematic cover-up of this kind of practice by the Catholic Church.”

The Jesuit order in Bolivia announced earlier this month that it has suspended eight of its senior officials over this new cover-up within the Catholic Church. And Bolivia’s President Luis Arce introduced a bill last weekend that would establish a truth commission to investigate specific cases of abuse in cases of sexual violence against children and adolescents.