Bolivian abuse survivors ask Vatican court to excommunicate two Spanish Jesuits

The Comunidad Boliviana de Sobrevivientes (Bolivian Community of Survivors, CBS), a group representing victims of clergy abuse, has asked the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the Holy See's highest court, to excommunicate two Spanish former Jesuit provincials. Marcos Recolons and Ramón Alaix were sentenced in 2025 to one year in prison for covering up the sexual abuse of minors in Bolivia by the priest Alfonso Pedrajas.

The Archdiocese of Cochabamba had refused to take up the canonical complaint, saying it lacked competence to do so. The survivors then took their request to the Holy See's highest court. They filed it on Tuesday through the Apostolic Nunciature in Bolivia, a few days after publishing an open letter to Pope Leo XIV to mark his visit to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru.

The CBS asked the tribunal to intervene directly so that the Vatican takes over the case and decides it. The document asks the Holy See either to call the file up to itself or, failing that, to determine which dicastery should receive it and to order the diocesan authority to open the preliminary investigation required by canon 1717 of the Code of Canon Law. That canon requires every bishop or major superior to investigate carefully any report of an offense that has at least the semblance of truth.

The CBS says the archdiocese's refusal to open that canonical investigation directly contradicts the canon. The request also asks the Vatican to set a deadline for the Archdiocese of Cochabamba to appoint an investigator, examine the court ruling against Recolons and Alaix and take testimony from relevant witnesses. The archdiocese would then send the file to whichever dicastery the tribunal designates.

The survivors also demand that the Holy See keep active watch on the process so that the inquiry is not halted again. That happened when the archdiocese declined to act, saying it had to wait for the end of the criminal trial so as not to interfere with it.

What the complaint alleges

In the canonical complaint first filed with the archdiocese, the CBS asked that Recolons and Alaix be excommunicated. It also asked that they be permanently barred from holding any church office, ministry or position, and from living in religious houses or in settings close to minors. The complaint accused them of cover-up, absolution of an accomplice in a sin against the sixth commandment with a minor, abuse of ecclesiastical power and offenses against human dignity, all of them offenses defined in the Code of Canon Law.

The two men convicted

Recolons, 82, was Jesuit provincial from 1993 to 1999 and later held one of the order's most senior posts in Rome. Alaix, 86, led the Society of Jesus in Bolivia from 1999 to 2007. Their one-year prison sentence was upheld last May and is now under review by Bolivia's Supreme Court of Justice.

The diary

The Pedrajas case became public on April 30, 2023, when the Spanish newspaper El País published the contents of the personal diary of the Jesuit, who died in 2009. In it he described abuse of dozens of children over at least three decades while he was in charge of the Juan XXIII school in Cochabamba, which he ran from 1971. The ruling against the two former provincials found the diary to be authentic and accepted as proven the roles Pedrajas held at the school and his work as novice master for the Society of Jesus.

The pope has the file

In their submission to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the survivors note that Pope Leo XIV already has detailed information on the case. In April, El País gave him a flash drive with six reports. They contained more than 800 testimonies; a list of 64 bishops and 26 superiors accused of cover-up, among them Recolons and Alaix; specific documentation on the Pedrajas case; and a copy of the book Padre Pica: cartografía de un abusador de la iglesia, by Julio Núñez, the author who brought the Spanish priest's diary to light.

The scale of the problem

Shortly before the pope arrived in Peru, Bishop Accountability, a group that documents sexual abuse cases in the Church, released a list of 77 Catholic clergy accused of sexual assault that includes Pedrajas. In its open letter to Leo XIV, the CBS says that in every earlier attempt to obtain justice from the Bolivian Bishops' Conference or the archdioceses of Santa Cruz and Cochabamba "impunity reigned thanks to the institutional scaffolding that facilitated the commission of their crimes and protected them from within the Tarraconense provincial curia, the Bolivian province and the Jesuit General Curia in Rome."

The letter ends by demanding that the abuse crisis in Bolivia receive "a just and definitive institutional response" and by asking for a direct meeting between victims and the pope. El País has estimated the number of victims of abuse by Jesuit clergy in Bolivia since the 1960s at around 500, a figure the CBS puts at more than 1,000.