In Chile, more than 100 Catholic clergy are being investigated over alleged sex crimes and attempts to cover them up.
It’s a scandal that haunts the reign of Pope Francis and has tipped the Chilean church into crisis. But it began decades ago with one man – Father Fernando Karadima, a parish priest in Santiago, who became Chile’s most notorious sexual predator.
“He offered you the vision of being called by the Lord. He showed you a very wonderful world,” remembers Dr James Hamilton, a gastric surgeon now in his 50s.
“He always told us he had a special gift – a kind of miracle gift – that he could see in every young person, if they had been called by God. He was almost a kind of saint.”
Father Fernando Karadima offered the adolescent James Hamilton refuge in the early 1980s. Chile had been under the dictatorship of Gen Augusto Pinochet for a decade. And in those troubled years of killings and disappearances, the church community created by this charismatic priest in the upmarket Santiago parish of El Bosque provided welcome reassurance.
“For a young person, it was like the bee and the honey – it was sweet in a world of difficulties, when you were struggling with your family,” says James Hamilton.
