Abusive priest defended by Bergoglio gets 15 years

A priest who was defended by Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio has begun a 15-year prison sentence for the sexual abuse of an adolescent boy in the 1990s. Fr Julio Cesar Grassi, 57, was the leader of Buenos Aires’ Happy Children Foundation, a centre for troubled boys, at the time the crime took place.
Grassi has consistently maintained his innocence. “In my life, all I have done was to help the children in need,” he told the provincial court in Moron that jailed him on Monday. “The prosecutors have lied and set up a case against me.”

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi declined to comment on the case, but it is making headlines in Argentina. According to the The Wall Street Journal, in a 2006 interview with the Argentine magazine Veintitres, Cardinal Bergoglio said: “There is a media campaign against [Fr Grassi], a condemnation in the media.” He said that Fr Grassi had not been suspended from priestly duties because his case was “different” from other cases of alleged sexual abuse that emerged at the time.

Youths under his charge first accused Grassi of abuse in 1996. He was eventually convicted of aggravated sexual assault in 2009, but while the appeal process continued he was allowed to live across the road from the youth centre. His final appeal, to the Supreme Court, will be made from prison.

After Fr Grassi’s conviction in 2009, the Argentine Bishops’ Conference, headed by Cardinal Bergoglio, commissioned a legal study defending the priest, The Wall Street Journal reported. The introduction, written by an Argentine jurist, said Fr Grassi was innocent and that many sexual abuse cases were part of a strategy to defame the Church.