Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 11, 2023 / 12:15 pm (CNA).
A Catholic priest pleaded guilty this week to charges of child sex exploitation related to the transport of a minor from South Carolina to Florida several years ago.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of South Carolina said in a press release Thursday that 68-year-old Jamie Adolfo Gonzalez-Farias had entered a guilty plea on charges of transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
Gonzalez-Farias admitted to having “transported a minor victim from South Carolina to Florida with the intent to commit lewd and lascivious exhibition and lewd and lascivious molestation,” the attorney’s office said.
The clergyman had been arrested in January of this year on the charges. He had been visiting the Diocese of Charleston from the Diocese of San Bernardo in Chile.
A federal indictment at the time accused him of “us[ing] a facility and means of interstate and foreign commerce” to “persuade, induce, entice, and coerce” an 11-year-old victim “to engage in sexual activity.”
Investigators reportedly recovered text messages and WhatsApp communications from the priest to the victim that were “consistent with the victim’s disclosures.”
The priest reportedly admitted to investigators that he “showered with the victim, that he touched the minor victim’s genitals, and that he showed the minor victim pornography.”
The Charleston Diocese had previously listed Gonzales-Farias as a priest with a credible allegation of child sexual abuse.
The diocese said in a statement earlier this year that it “was made aware of an allegation of sexual misconduct with a minor involving visiting priest Father Jaime Gonzalez-Farias in December 2020, after he had left the country for his home in Chile.” Church officials reported the matter to the Laurens County Sheriff’s Office, which eventually informed the FBI of the crimes.
The priest had been subject to multiple background checks prior to the allegations, the diocese said earlier this year, with no indication of any criminal activity in his record.
The diocese did not immediately return a request for comment on the guilty plea Friday morning.
Gonzalez-Farias will be sentenced at a later date per the recommendations of the U.S. Probation Office. He faces up to life in prison for his crimes as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines; he also must register as a sex offender.
The FBI said it was still seeking information about any other potential victims of Gonzalez-Farias.
The priest was ordained in 1990 and has held roles as a pastor, parochial vicar, administrator, and chaplain.
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On the somewhat good news front regarding the abuse crisis/scandals, a wrongly accused priest in Detroit, Michigan, Fr. Eduard Perrone of Assumption Grotto Parish, has finally been allowed to serve that parish as a priest with full priestly faculties. He did not get reinstated as the Pastor of that Church due in part to his passing the age when he must submit his resignation as Pastor, but having his full priestly faculties restored to serve the Assumption Grotto Parish is indeed a good thing and long overdue.
Fr. Perrone’s case received national attention, starting back in 2019 when he was removed as Pastor over an alleged “groping incident” that morphed into a fabricated rape charge that allegedly occurred some 40 years earlier (included another infamous “repressed memory” claim at the outset), and it was only last year that he was given permission to say Mass at other parishes on a limited basis despite the Vatican itself advising the Detroit Archdiocese at some point in 2020 or 2021 that there was nothing for the Vatican to further pursue (its version of dismissing the case). Moreover, and very early in the case, the accuser recanted his initial accusation and also claimed that a local police officer and a Monsignor from the Archdiocese of Detroit flat out ignored him in order to bring charges against Fr. Perrone to effectuate his suspension that brought about his more than 4-year unjust ordeal.
Fr. Perrone is known throughout the US as a solid traditional priest who says both the Novus Ordo and Latin Masses, and his “conservative” bona fides frequently bumped up against the more progressive Detroit Archdiocese leadership. Sadly, this reality appears to have played a very large role in the railroading of this solid priest, but at least the Archbishop of Detroit finally did a good and righteous thing to undo at least some of the wrong that was visited upon Fr. Perrone.
On the somewhat good news front regarding the abuse crisis/scandals, a wrongly accused priest in Detroit, Michigan, Fr. Eduard Perrone of Assumption Grotto Parish, has finally been allowed to serve that parish as a priest with full priestly faculties. He did not get reinstated as the Pastor of that Church due in part to his passing the age when he must submit his resignation as Pastor, but having his full priestly faculties restored to serve the Assumption Grotto Parish is indeed a good thing and long overdue.
Fr. Perrone’s case received national attention, starting back in 2019 when he was removed as Pastor over an alleged “groping incident” that morphed into a fabricated rape charge that allegedly occurred some 40 years earlier (included another infamous “repressed memory” claim at the outset), and it was only last year that he was given permission to say Mass at other parishes on a limited basis despite the Vatican itself advising the Detroit Archdiocese at some point in 2020 or 2021 that there was nothing for the Vatican to further pursue (its version of dismissing the case). Moreover, and very early in the case, the accuser recanted his initial accusation and also claimed that a local police officer and a Monsignor from the Archdiocese of Detroit flat out ignored him in order to bring charges against Fr. Perrone and effectuate his suspension that brought about his more than 4-year unjust ordeal.
Fr. Perrone is known throughout the US as a solid traditional priest who says both the Novus Ordo and Latin Masses, and his “conservative” bona fides frequently bumped up against the more progressive Detroit Archdiocese leadership. Sadly, this reality appears to have played a very large role in the railroading of this solid priest, but at least the Archbishop of Detroit finally did a good and righteous thing to undo at least some of the wrong that was visited upon Fr. Perrone.
Thank you for writing this.
I would still like to see an apology from the progressive Detroit Archdiocese leadership.It pains me that Fr. Perrone had to endure this from those in charge…. now they need to be watched!
AP News reported that the victim was a boy. Why does the Catholic World Report avoid mentioning this fact in its article?
To be clear, the news brief is from and by Catholic News Agency. CWR posted it (as we do almost all CNA briefs), but we didn’t produce it.
That said, I don’t know why it doesn’t mention that the minor was a boy, especially since a Jan 9, 2023 CNA piece reports on the same priest being arrested for abusing an 11-year-old girl.