Argentine Catholic Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta will go on trial on sexual abuse charges in October.
The public prosecutor’s office of the Argentine province of Salta announced on Aug. 6 that the trial would take place on Oct. 12-15.
Zanchetta was given a Vatican post by Pope Francis after he resigned as bishop of Orán, northwest Argentina, in 2017.
The 57-year-old bishop is charged with simple sexual abuse, aggravated by being committed by an officially recognized minister of religion, against two men identified only by their initials, G.G.F.L. and C.M.
Zanchetta has denied the allegations.
“The former bishop [of Orán] was summoned under penalty of law and at least 39 witnesses are expected to testify during the hearing,” the public prosecutor’s office said.
Pope Francis named Zanchetta as bishop of Orán on July 23, 2013, in one of his first episcopal appointments in his homeland of Argentina.
After resigning as the head of Orán diocese for “health reasons” at the age of 53, Zanchetta was appointed to the specially created position of assessor at the Vatican’s Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA).
APSA oversees the Vatican’s real estate holdings and other sovereign assets.
Argentine media have reported that Zanchetta was first accused of sexually inappropriate behavior as early as 2015, two years before he arrived at the Vatican.
But the Vatican has repeatedly denied having prior knowledge of sexual abuse allegations against Zanchetta before his December 2017 appointment to APSA.
According to a report from El Tribuno, a newspaper in Salta Province, one of Zanchetta’s secretaries alerted authorities after discovering sexually explicit images sent and received on Zanchetta’s cell phone in 2015.
The complaint said that some of the images depicted “young people” having sex, in addition to lewd images of Zanchetta himself.
Pope Francis summoned Zanchetta to Rome for five days in October 2015. The bishop claimed that his phone and computer had been hacked, and that the accusations were motivated by ill-feeling towards the pope. The pope accepted the bishop’s explanation that his cell phone had been hacked.
The pope defended his decision-making regarding Zanchetta in an interview with the Mexican journalist Valentina Alazraki published in May 2019 by Vatican News. He said that he had continuously sought to clarify the accusations against Zanchetta.
After Zanchetta was charged in relation to his actions against two men in July 2019, Orán’s Economic Crime Unit raided offices in the chancery in November 2019. The raid was carried out to investigate Zanchetta’s alleged fraud against the state, according to the local newspaper El Oranense.
In addition to accusations of mismanaging Church funds donated by the faithful in the diocese, public records show that Zanchetta received more than a million Argentine pesos (around $10,500) from Salta Province to restore a rectory and for lectures at a seminary, which allegedly never took place.
Pope Francis defended his appointment of Zanchetta to APSA in his interview with Valentina Alazraki. He said that, although the bishop’s approach to economic management in Orán had been “disorderly,” the “vision is good.”
The accused bishop was suspended from his role as an assessor at APSA amid a canonical investigation, announced in January 2019.
In June 2020, the Vatican confirmed that Zanchetta had returned to work at APSA while “remaining available to the Argentine judicial authorities.”
A source working at APSA told CNA in June that the Argentine bishop had finished his service at the Vatican’s central reserve bank.
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Image of “Santa Muerte,” or “St. Death.” / Credit: David Ramos/ACI Prensa
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Members of the Sts’ailes First Nation at Holy Rosary Cathedral last year for the first Mass to integrate a First Nation language. A Cardus report presents the voices of Indigenous Canadians speaking about their faith and distinguishing it from the traditional spirituality they’re often associated with. / Photo courtesy Nicholas Elbers, 2022
Vancouver, Canada, May 17, 2023 / 14:15 pm (CNA).
A groundbreaking report published by the Ottawa-based Cardus Institute has given voice to Indigenous Canadians who are frustrated by secular society’s unawareness of — or unwillingness to accept — the fact that almost half of them are Christian.
“I find that insulting to Indigenous people’s intelligence and freedom,” Catholic priest Father Cristino Bouvette said of the prejudice he regularly encounters.
Bouvette, who has mixed Cree-Métis and Italian heritage and now serves as vicar for vocations and Young Adults in the Diocese of Calgary, was one of 12 individuals interviewed by Cardus for the report “Indigenous Voices of Faith.”
Prejudice against Indigenous Christians has become so strong, even inside some Indigenous communities, “that Indigenous Christians in this country right now are living in the time of new martyrdom,” Bouvette said.
Although that martyrdom may not cost them their lives, “they are ostracized and humiliated sometimes within their own communities if they openly express their Christian or Catholic faith.”
Statistics Canada reported last year that the 2021 census found that 850,000, or 47%, of Canada’s 1.8-million Indigenous people identify as Christian and that more than a quarter of the total report they are Catholic. Only 73,000, or 4%, of Indigenous people said they adhere to traditional Indigenous spiritual beliefs.
Ukrainian Catholic Deacon Andrew Bennett, program director for Cardus Faith Communities, conducted the interviews for the think tank last fall. He published his report in March at a time when Canadian mainstream media and many political leaders continued to stir division and prejudice through misleading commentary about abandoned cemeteries at Indian Residential Schools.
The purpose of the report, he writes, “is to affirm and to shed light on the religious freedom of Indigenous peoples to hold the beliefs and engage in the practices that they choose and to contextualize their faith within their own cultures.”
Too often, however, “the public narrative implies, or boldly declares, that there’s a fundamental incompatibility between Indigenous Canadians and Christianity or other faiths,” Bennett said. “[M]any Indigenous Canadians strongly disagree with those narratives.”
Father Bouvette is clearly one of those.
“We did not have Christian faith imposed upon us because of [my Indigenous grandmother’s] time in the residential school or her father’s time in the trade school that he was sent to,” Bouvette said. “No, it was because our family freely chose to receive the saving message of Jesus Christ and lived it and had continued to pass it down.”
Bouvette said his “grandmother was not tricked into becoming something that she didn’t want to be, and then tricked into staying that way for 99 years and 11 months of her life. She was a Christian from the day of her birth, and she remained a Christian until the day of her death. And so that was not by the consequence of some imposition.”
Nevertheless, Canadians continue to labor under a prejudice holding the opposite view. “I do believe that probably the majority of Canadians at this time, out of some mistaken notion of guilt for whatever their cultural or ethnic background is, think they are somehow responsible for Indigenous people having had something thrust upon them that they didn’t want,” Bouvette said.
“But I would say, give us a little more credit than that and assume that if there is an Indigenous person who continues to persevere in the Christian faith it is because they want to, because they understand why they have chosen to in the first place, and they remain committed to it. We should be respectful of that.”
The executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, Christian Elia, agrees and says society should grant Indigenous Catholics the respect and personal agency that is due all Canadians.
“Firstly, I am not an Indigenous person, so I cannot speak for our Indigenous brothers and sisters, but neither can non-Indigenous secularists who choose to ignore that Indigenous people in Canada continue to self-identify as Christian, the majority of these Catholic,” Elia said in an interview with The B.C. Catholic.
He said his organization has heard from many Indigenous Catholics who are “growing weary of the ongoing assumption that somehow they have been coerced into the faith, that it is inconceivable that they wish to be Catholic. This condescending attitude must stop.”
Deacon Rennie Nahanee, who serves at St. Paul’s Indian Church in North Vancouver, was another of the 12 whom Bennett interviewed. A cradle Catholic and member of the Squamish First Nation, Deacon Nahanee said there is nothing incompatible with being both an authentic Indigenous person and a Catholic.
“I’m pretty sure we had a belief in the Creator even before the missionaries came to British Columbia,” he said. “And our feelings, our thoughts about creation, the way that we lived and carried out our everyday lives, and the way that we helped to preserve the land and the animals that we used for food, our spirituality and our culture, were similar to the spirituality of the Catholic Church.”
“I believe that’s why our people accepted it. I don’t think anybody can separate themselves from God, even though they say so.”
Interviewed later by The B.C. Catholic, Nahanee said he is not bothered by the sort of prejudice outlined by Bouvette. “People are going to say or do what they want,” he said.
Voices of Indigenous Christianity
Bennett, program director of Cardus Faith Communities, interviewed 12 Indigenous Canadians, most of them Christian, about their religious commitments, “which often clash with the typical public presentation of Indigenous spirituality.” Here is a selection of some of their comments:
Tal James of the Penelakut First Nation in Nanaimo spoke about the relationship between Indigenous culture and his Christian faith:
“I think … that our [Indigenous] cultures were complete, and in Jesus they’re more complete. I think that’s a big thing and a big step for a lot of us. You’re going to have a lot of non-Indigenous people look at you and question your actions based on your Aboriginal heritage. Don’t take that to heart. They’re the ignorant ones who don’t want you to flourish. Those of you who are Christians, First Nations Christians, you come to the table with the same gifting that non-Aboriginal people have. For them to say, ‘We want to make room for you at the table,’ correct them. You are already at the table, and encourage them to step back and allow your gifts to flourish. Because it’s one in the same spirit.”
Rose-Alma McDonald, a Mohawk from Akwesasne, which borders New York, Ontario, and Quebec, talked about re-embracing her Catholic faith:
“I surprised everybody, including myself, in terms of embracing Catholicism after 20 years away. So I’ve had a few epiphanies in the sense that this is why my mother made me do so much in the church growing up. When I’m working, volunteering, and doing stuff in the church, I remember that. I keep remembering I’m Catholic and I’m still Catholic. I will stay Catholic because of the way I was raised.”
Jeff Decontie, a Mohawk from the Algonquin First Nations who lives in Ottawa, talked about being a person of faith in a secular world:
“Secular worldviews can sort of eat up everything around them and accept a whole wide range of beliefs at the same time. For example, you have the prevailing scientific thinking alongside New Age believers, and people in society just accept this, saying, ‘Oh, whatever it is you believe in, all religions lead to the same thing.’ No one questions it. How can these contradictions coexist? … Then we ask an [Indigenous] elder to lead prayer? Any other religion would be a no-no, but you can ask for an elder who’s going to pray a generic prayer to some generic Creator, and it’s not going to ruffle any feathers. I think that’s the danger of secular thought creeping into Canada: It goes unnoticed, it’s perceived as neutral, but at the same time it’s welcoming a whole wide range of beliefs. And it doesn’t just influence Indigenous thought. It’s influencing Christianity.”
Rosella Kinoshameg, a member of the Wikwemikong Reserve on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, spoke about being Indigenous and Catholic:
“Well, I can’t change being Indigenous. That’s something that is me. I can’t change that. But to believe in the things that I was taught, the traditional things, the way of life and the meanings of these things, and then in a church, well, those things help one another and they make me feel stronger.”
This article was originally published May 10, 2023, in The B.C. Catholic, a weekly publication serving the Catholic community in British Columbia, Canada, and is reprinted here on CNA with permission.
We are living again in the age of the Borgias. If a priest abuses children or men, and the authorities are trying to catch him, the Pope appoints him to a prominent post in the Vatican. How many others working in the Vatican are there for the same reason?
Not only does he promote these sleazy characters, but he remains doggedly loyal to them until it becomes completely untenable. Even then, he sometimes refuses to disavow them. Zanchetta is not the only one who should be facing criminal prosecution. It is fantasy, of course, but perhaps the only way Francis could be removed from the papal throne would be for him to be convicted of a criminal offense in one of the many countries where one of his henchmen has molested or embezzled.
The Zanchetta case points to why he refuses to visit Argentina. It would be a public relations disaster at best. Perhaps some bold prosecutor might even attempt an arrest.
We are living again in the age of the Borgias. If a priest abuses children or men, and the authorities are trying to catch him, the Pope appoints him to a prominent post in the Vatican. How many others working in the Vatican are there for the same reason?
Not only does he promote these sleazy characters, but he remains doggedly loyal to them until it becomes completely untenable. Even then, he sometimes refuses to disavow them. Zanchetta is not the only one who should be facing criminal prosecution. It is fantasy, of course, but perhaps the only way Francis could be removed from the papal throne would be for him to be convicted of a criminal offense in one of the many countries where one of his henchmen has molested or embezzled.
May justice be done.
Why does Pope Francis keep promoting and protecting so many criminals and perverts?
The old Chicago way. You eliminate opposition for your agenda, including simple verbal opposition, by maintaining dirt on potential opposition.
The Zanchetta case points to why he refuses to visit Argentina. It would be a public relations disaster at best. Perhaps some bold prosecutor might even attempt an arrest.