Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Other Christian institutions & contexts Catholic Santiago, Chile · 2011

Chile: Karadima — judicially established abuse, prescription bar, and a final civil judgment against the Church

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Civil finding

Authority role

parish priest of El Bosque and Chile's most influential spiritual director of seminarians and young men

Organization

Parroquia El Bosque, Providencia, Archdiocese of Santiago

Spiritual nexus

Adolescents and young men under Chile's most powerful spiritual director, inside a parish culture the courts described as one of total obedience — the survivors' testimony that broke the Chilean Church's cover-up era.

  • Pastoral or clerical authority
  • Guru or spiritual-teacher authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2011-11-14 · judicial fact-finding despite prescription; final civil judgment against the archdiocese

    Visiting judge, Santiago (2011); Corte de Apelaciones de Santiago (2012, 2019). Fernando Karadima was never criminally convicted: on 14 November 2011 visiting judge Jessica González dismissed the case as prescribed while expressly establishing as proven the abuses of Juan Carlos Cruz, James Hamilton and José Andrés Murillo (1981–1995), finding their testimony truthful — a ruling ratified on appeal in January 2012. On 27 March 2019 the Corte de Apelaciones de Santiago ordered the Archdiocese to pay CLP 100 million to each of the three for negligent cover-up; the ruling went unappealed and was paid in June 2019. The Vatican found him canonically guilty in 2011 and laicised him in 2018. He died in 2021.

Appellate history

  1. 2012-01-09 · undefined

    undefined

  2. 2019-03-27 · undefined

    undefined

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • spiritual direction of adolescents and young men in the El Bosque community
  • cult-like obedience culture the courts and Vatican both described

Primary record

Sources

national newspaper court reporting judicial finding report 'Caso Karadima: jueza dicta sobreseimiento y acredita delitos imputados', El Mostrador, 14 Nov. 2011.

Reports the resolution establishing the facts while dismissing on prescription.

national newspaper court reporting civil judgment La Tercera: the full 2019 appellate civil ruling against the archdiocese.

The civil judgment text via a national paper of record.

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