Sexual abuse of members of the Catholic Church in El Salvador has been recognized as existing since at least the 1980s, and has been condemned by the Salvadoran justice system.
In November 2015, sex abuse scandals in El Salvador's sole non-military Catholic diocese, the Archdiocese of San Salvador, started coming to light [1] when the Archdiocese's third highest ranking priest Jesus Delgado, who was also the biographer and personal secretary of the Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero [2] was dismissed by the Archdiocese after its investigation showed that he had molested a girl, now 42 years of age, when she was between the ages of 9 and 17. [2] Due to the statute of limitations, Delgado could not face criminal charges. [3] In December 2016, a canonical court convicted Delgado and two other El Salvador priests, Francisco Galvez and Antonio Molina, of committing acts of sex abuse between the years 1980 and 2000 and laicized them from the priesthood. [1] [4] [5] [3]
In November 2019, the Archdiocese acknowledged sex abuse committed by a priest identified as Leopoldo Sosa Tolentino in 1994 and issued a public apology to his victim. [1] Tolentino, has been suspended from ministry and has begun the canonical trial process. [6]
It was also reported at this time that another El Salvador priest had been laicized in 2019 after pleading guilty to sex abuse in a Vatican trial and is serving a 16 year prison sentence after being convicted in a criminal trial. [1]
Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez was a prelate of the Catholic Church in El Salvador. He served as Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, the Titular Bishop of Tambeae, as Bishop of Santiago de María, and finally as the fourth Archbishop of San Salvador. As archbishop, Romero spoke out against social injustice and violence amid the escalating conflict between the military government and left-wing insurgents that led to the Salvadoran Civil War. In 1980, Romero was shot by an assassin while celebrating Mass. Though no one was ever convicted for the crime, investigations by the UN-created Truth Commission for El Salvador concluded that Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, a death squad leader and later founder of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) political party, had ordered the killing.
There have been many cases of sexual abuse of children by priests, nuns, and other members of religious life in the Catholic Church. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the cases have involved many allegations, investigations, trials, convictions, acknowledgement and apologies by Church authorities, and revelations about decades of instances of abuse and attempts by Church officials to cover them up. The abused include mostly boys but also girls, some as young as three years old, with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. Criminal cases for the most part do not cover sexual harassment of adults. The accusations of abuse and cover-ups began to receive public attention during the late 1980s. Many of these cases allege decades of abuse, frequently made by adults or older youths years after the abuse occurred. Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who covered up sex abuse allegations and moved abusive priests to other parishes, where abuse continued.
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The Archdiocese of San Salvador is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or archdiocese of the Catholic Church in El Salvador. Its archepiscopal see is the Salvadoran capital, San Salvador, and the surrounding region.
This page documents Catholic Church sexual abuse cases by country.
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