Image by Kai Pilger.

Ana Maria was a nine-year-old girl from a little town called Chiclayo, Peru in 2007 when the Catholic Church robbed her of her childhood. She didn’t even see it coming. A beloved friar known popularly as Father Lute at the church she was raised in had arranged to accompany her on a mission to another parish. Her parents and teachers told her this was a great honor, and all the other little girls and boys were jealous. She would get to stay overnight in a different town at a different parish with the full and undivided attention of one of the most beloved and well-respected men in her community. She couldn’t possibly say no even if she wanted to.

But the moment that Ana Maria and Father Lute were alone in a faraway place, things very rapidly became strange and frightening. The parish facilities they were staying at only had one bed and Father Lute insisted that they share it. Ana Maria felt deeply uncomfortable with this arrangement but what could she do? How could she say no? She had trouble sleeping next to this grown man who everyone she knew held in such high regard but before she could drift off, he was all over her, hugging her, kissing her, caressing her, putting his great big hands all over her tiny defenseless body. This time Ana Maria tried to say no, she tried over and over again, but the beloved Father Lute didn’t care. It was like the man had transformed into an insatiable beast in that bed the moment the lights were off.

Ana Maria wanted to believe that it was all just a bad dream, but it wasn’t, and it kept happening. Father Lute arranged for more overnight visits to more faraway parishes for the two of them and they always seemed to have only one bed to share. Sometimes another local friar came too. Ana Maria didn’t know what to do. She felt like dying but everyone around her just kept reminding her of what a great honor it was to be the focus of such interest from such a distinguished man of the cloth, so she kept quiet while Father Lute kept his hands all over her childhood. Eventually, finally, the missions ended but the nightmares didn’t. No bed that Ana Maria slept in felt safe. Years went by before she finally broke her silence. She told her two sisters about the strange trips with Father Lute and to her shock her sisters confessed that they too had been preyed upon by the same man of God in the exact same fashion, all between the tender ages of 10 and 14.

Ana Maria was furious. This man who the community had trusted completely with its children was a monster and he needed to be stopped. The friar had since gone on to become a popular parish priest in Chiclayo, with access to God knows how many more innocent and trusting young boys and girls just like Ana and her sisters. So, the three contacted Chiclayo’s Bishop by phone in 2020 to confess. But the Bishop refused to even meet with them in person for two years, using the Pandemic as an excuse. When the sisters finally met with the most powerful Catholic in their diocese, he insisted that there was very little that the Church could do for them and suggested that they seek out the civil authorities instead. When the sisters continued to demand an investigation within the Church they still loved, the Bishop relented reluctantly and sent them to something he had just established called a “listening center” where Church officials heard their stories and opened an official investigation.

At first, Ana Maria and her sisters were hopeful. Father Lute had been removed from his parish very quickly even though officials announced his departure as being for health reasons. But as the months went by without any follow up from Chruch officials, the sisters lost their patience. 8 months after they had lodged an official complaint with their Bishop, the three sisters finally took his original advice and reached out to civil authorities only to be shocked when local prosecutors closed the case due to the statute of limitations having expired years ago, something any local Bishop would certainly have known but by that time the local Bishop was long gone.

Bishop Robert Prevost had been plucked from tiny Chiclayo, Peru by Pope Francis himself in 2023 and sent to Rome where he was made a Cardinal and appointed to the prestigious and highly influential Dicastery for Bishops. A number of other strange things happened that year affecting Ana Maria and the people of Chiclayo, and all roads seemed to lead back to Rome. The bishop selected to replace Prevost discovered that Father Lute, also known as Father Eluterio Vasquez Gonzales, was still celebrating mass in a nearby parish and when confronted on the accusations against him the priest made little attempt to deny the abuse, quickly making a full confession.

By this time his case had finally made its way to Rome just in time for Prevost to take his new position of power in the Vatican. Strangely, the case was very quickly closed in spite of the fact that the accused had now confessed to being guilty. Even stranger, the basis for the closure of the case was the decision made by civil prosecutors not to pursue it even though Canonical investigations are supposedly completely independent of civil ones and aren’t commanded by the same statutes of limitations which were the only reasons the civil case did not proceed. Something very strange had happened, and it wasn’t hard to connect the dots once the dust had settled.

The Bishop of Chiclayo had clearly lied to Ana Maria and her sisters, encouraging them to take their case to a place where he knew it would meet a dead end. When they chose the Canonical route instead, it appears that the bishop created his own dead end with his newfound influence over the various kangaroo courts of the Vatican. In case you haven’t guessed, this bishop is now the Pope. Early this month, a church already ruptured by an international sex abuse scandal that reaches across oceans and continents chose to make Cardinal Robert Prevost ‘Pope Leo XIV’ and the shadowy case of Ana Maria and her sisters is far from the only stain on his cassock.

Prevost is a lifelong member of the Order of Saint Augustine, eventually serving as the head of this organization for decades, first in the United States and then internationally. The Augustinians are notorious among survivors of Catholic abuse like me for being one of the most stubbornly backward sects in Catholicism when it comes to transparency and reform, and the Chicago born Pope Leo’s Midwest Augustinians are among the worst of the worst, only creating a publicly available list for what it deems to be credibly accused offenders amongst its ranks last year and only doing so under immense public pressure after one of their priests, Reverand Richard McGrath, the longtime principal of Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox, Illinois, was accused of raping minors and trading in child pornography.

However, amazingly, McGrath is still not on that fucking list because somehow even he doesn’t meet the Augustinian standards for guilt even though he was more than guilty enough for them to settle out of court for $2 million dollars when one of McGrath’s many victims sued the Order in 2017. A large portion of Father McGrath’s crime spree occurred during Pope Leo’s leadership of this chapter of the Augustinians, a reign that also saw Leo house another accused pedophile priest named Father James Ray at a South Side monastery down the street from a Catholic elementary school without so much as even informing the school or the public. McGrath would later be housed at this exact same monastery after he was accused, only by this time that monastery was literally across the street from a preschool and this is where this shit gets personal for me.

Back in the nineties I was taken from a Catholic preschool in Central Pennsylvania by a travelling priest like Lute, Ray, and McGrath. I never caught that strangers name, but he and another priest savagely raped me in the rectory down the street. I was five years old, and I still have flashbacks where I’m choking on parts of their bodies. My abuse occurred under the leadership of Pope John Paul who we now know moved at least three priests accused of molestation to different parishes while he was still known as Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow, in the 1970s. This was right around the time that his successor, a man who died with the name Pope Benedict XVI, was moving around his own pedophile priests as Joseph Ratzinger, Archbishop of Munich.

Pope Francis appears to have been busier protecting generals than priests while he was still Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, but that didn’t stop him from appointing Cardinal George Pell, an Australian holy man already soaked in cover-up charges, to be his “anti-corruption czar” and it also didn’t stop Francis from defending that bastard either after he was accused of taking part in the abuse himself by multiple parties.

Every decade or so, another one of these gawdy creeps drops dead in his gold jewelry and different wings of what’s left of the Catholic Church take turns cheering or booing his replacement, but every single Pope going back at least half a century has been proven guilty of taking part in enabling a wholesale child sex ring that they all continue to insist is some kind of religion.

I wrote this rant, another fucking rant about another fucking Pope with a long and absurdly well-recorded history of putting predators before children, because I want to know, I sincerely need to know, as one of those broken children, when is it enough? How many childhoods do you people need to cannibalize, how many Ana Maria’s do you need to crucify before you put down the goddamn rosary and recognize that the Vatican is not a church, it is a criminal organization, and there is no ideology that will cure this crypt of shattered innocence from being a mafia.

Jesus Christ himself would burn that city to the fucking ground and he would do it with the former Bishop of Chiclayo still inside.

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