A former missionary has denounced the Catholic religious order he belonged to for overseeing a system of "sexual slavery" in Kenya and he has taken his case to the Vatican.
He claims the Missionary Community of Saint Paul the Apostle (MCSPA), founded in Spain in the 1990s, subjected members of its staff and locals to sexual and labour abuse, El País newspaper has reported.
"I have been the slave and sexual slave of a group of depraved individuals who were covered up by the hierarchy of the [Catholic] Church," the 36-year-old man, who calls himself "Paulino", told Pope Francis in a letter outlining his alleged abuse over a three-year period in Kenya.
“They told us that an active sex life is what God wants us to have and that he also wants us to be naked because he created us naked. Help me, Francis. Give my broken soul some relief. Don’t let other youngsters go through this hell.”
Vatican inquiry
Two other similar complaints, by a boy and a girl, were made about the MCSPA, according to
El Pa
ís
, but neither reached the pope. However, the Vatican is believed to be investigating, after the pope received a dossier containing all three testimonies in September.
"The events are of such seriousness that the corresponding ecclesiastic authority must act immediately," wrote Cardinal Stanislaw Rylko, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, in the dossier.
The MCSPA was founded and led by Francisco Andreo, a charismatic priest. In 1995, prior to its establishment, Fr Andreo and others were investigated in Barcelona, following allegations of sexual abuse of minors at a seminary. However, there were no criminal charges, although some of those implicated reportedly received sanctions from church authorities. Fr Andreo then set up the MCSPA, which went on to have missions in Africa and Latin America.
He died in 2013, aged 71. The MCSPA still has missions across Africa and the Philippines.
"Francisco Andreo organised orgies with men and women in which sometimes he actively took part, and other times he watched while a missionary fornicated with two Africans," Paulino told El País. "When he wanted sex, Andreo called a boy to his room."
A previous Vatican probe into the MCSPA’s activities in Kenya, in 2006, concluded there had been no abuse.
Now, however, Paulino seems to have a powerful ally in Fidel Blasco Canalejas, a Spanish priest with influence in Rome who has campaigned for cases of alleged clerical abuse to be investigated, including this one.
Pablo Cirujeda, a priest who spent eight years working alongside Fr Andreo, has denied any knowledge of wrongdoing by the MCSPA. "We have never seen this camp of horrors that Paulino describes," he told El País.
