The previous bishop of Tenerife, Bernardo Álvarez, who died in November at 76 years old, told a citizen who has been reporting for years that he suffered abuse as a child by a priest of his Diocese that minors had provoked him when he was a priest in La Palma.
"I have experience of that, as a priest: girls and boys of 13 or 14 years old who have provoked me. Keep in mind that a few years ago the age of sexual consent was 14 years old. Now it is 16 or 18," Bernardo Álvarez is heard saying in some audios recorded by the complainant and revealed this Thursday by El País and Cadena SER.
These recordings are made public two and a half months before Pope Leo XIV visits the two dioceses of the Canary Islands, with a multitudinous mass scheduled in Tenerife on June 12, and have been handed over by the complainant of the facts both to the Prosecutor's Office and to the Vatican's Commission for the Protection of Minors.
The complainant had already informed the Bishopric of Tenerife about the alleged abuses he suffered at the hands of a priest previously, when Bernardo Álvarez was vicar general of the Diocese. And then he made them public, among other things by telling them in a plenary session of the La Laguna City Council (October 2022).
A month before the prelate died, he met with him. In the recording of the meeting, Álvarez is heard acknowledging that he was aware of the case. In fact, he explains to him that what his predecessor in the Bishopric did was to transfer the accused priest to Salamanca.
But, according to El País, neither Bernardo Álvarez's predecessor, Felipe Fernández, nor Álvarez himself when he took charge of the Diocese (2005) then opened a canonical process against the denounced priest, which prompted the affected party to go to court in 2014, which declared the facts prescribed (allegedly, they had occurred between 1997 and 2003).
"When (the denounced priest) confessed to us, he dedicated himself to touching us, he even gave me a kiss on the mouth, and he asked us if we masturbated. He caressed you, he put his hand in one’s pants. None of the altar boys wanted to go to the priest's house. In the end, along with five other boys, we told the catechists, but the people from the parish took care of crucifying me and my family," the affected person told the newspaper.
When the case was filed in ordinary Justice, the affected party again presented his complaint before the Diocese of Tenerife, invoking the new norms approved in this regard by the Vatican. At that moment, Bernardo Álvarez informed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and preventively suspended the priest, but the procedure did not go forward because the priest left the habits.
In his meeting with Bernardo Álvarez, the complainant emphasized to him the harm that his family had suffered since he brought the facts to the attention of Bishop Felipe Fernández, in the form of threats from parishioners of his locality.
"How is that repaired? Are they never going to publicly acknowledge that that happened and are they not going to apologize?", he questioned him, to which Álvarez replied: "What you should have done, when I was appointed bishop (2005), was to have come".
In the conversation, the former bishop of Tenerife links abuses such as homosexuality.
"80% of those who have abused minors are homosexuals," he warns the complainant. He replies: "A homosexual sleeps with someone their own age or at least with someone who is not a minor. He who abuses a child is not because he is homosexual."
In 2007, Bernardo Álvarez already starred in a controversy when the newspaper La Opinión de Tenerife published an interview in which he stated: "There may be minors who do consent to it and, in fact, there are. There are 13-year-old adolescents who are minors and are perfectly in agreement and, furthermore, desiring it. Even if you're not careful, they provoke you."
