After 3 years of suffering, the Salvadoran priest José Antonio Molina was exonerated from the charge of pedophilia by the civil court. His accuser had invented everything by going to report to the bishop. But in the meantime the Pope issued the unappealable decree of suspension a divinis. The analogies with the Pell case: when there is only one word to accuse.
On November 1st 2016, the Salvadoran priest José Antonio Molina was summoned to the archbishopric of San Salvador to make known the decision of Pope Francis to suspend a divinis for a crime of pedophilia. The provision entailed the definitive loss of all the prerogatives of the priestly state. But three years later, years of suffering, humiliation and pain for the young priest and his family, the truth finally came to the surface. A civil court decreed the innocence of Father Antonio Molina thanks to the confession of the accuser who admitted that he had tarnished the honor of the priest: "they were only calumnies". A case that has the paradoxical if you think that it is a priest condemned by the same Church but declared innocent by the State.
Don Antonio Molina, who was pastor of the parish of "Santa Croce in Rome" in the town of Panchimalco (a town a few kilometers from the capital) was shown the letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, containing the decree written in Latin and signed by the same Supreme Pontiff Francesco. The letter spoke of an "irrevocable decision that does not allow for recourse" (a terminology, that of unenforceability, used by the Pope and emphasized with incisiveness by the media in the clamorous case of the former Cardinal T. McCarrick). According to canon law, in fact, a sentence issued directly by the Pope cannot be appealed, while for example decisions taken by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith can be appealed:
It was therefore the same Pope Francis who, having received the documentation from the archdiocese of San Salvador, sentenced him and imposed the most severe penalty against Don Antonio Molina. The sentence came in a very short time, without the investigation being deepened and without listening to the reasons of the young priest who, from the beginning and for three long years, declared himself a stranger to the facts and therefore innocent.
In 2016 Molina, already prefect of studies in the diocesan seminary, was accused of sexual violence by a 35-year-old man, Isaí Ernesto Mendoza. According to the accusation, Don Molina would have organized orgies in the parish and sexually abused the young altar boy, at that time a minor, between 1993 and 1996 (Molina was parish priest of Santa Croce for two periods from 1993 to 1996 and from 2006 to 2016) . In addition, the priest threatened to kill his victim. To this was added the accusation of two women (two twins, now thirty-five) who claimed to have been touched by the priest when they were minors. The accusation was based exclusively on the words of the persons concerned and did not count with evidence or testimonies to ascertain the truth of the facts. Despite many contradictions present in the accusation (there was no group of altar boys at that time and it would seem that the Mendoza family, which among other things attends a Protestant sect in the "Temple of the Tabernacle", has never lived in Panchimalco) in a short time the Vatican decreed the immediate suspension of the priest. What is astonishing is that the case was considered so blatant by the Bishop and the accusation so certain and truthful that the matter did not deserve any investigation by the local church or Salvadoran justice. From what has been learned it would seem that in this case the correct procedure has not been followed which envisages a diocesan phase praevia, the sending of documentation to the Doctrine of the Faith and a diocesan administrative process to evaluate a possible appeal of the accused, while reserving the appeal to the Holy Father (very rare in itself) only for really exceptional and very serious cases.
Without waiting for further tests, without instituting an investigation, or further assessing the accusations to ascertain the dynamics of the facts (for many similar cases the times are very long and we expect glaring evidence) the case was put in the hands of the Supreme Pontiff who has sentenced the immediate suspension of the priest. The same local newspapers read the sentence as a "punch on the table" of the archbishop, a clear sign of "zero tolerance" against this serious crime. A kind of "exemplary condemnation"? "The speed with which the trials were resolved seemed like a hit on the table, a message that the Church had committed to fighting this crime. With Molina's case, it didn't take them a year. "
Meanwhile, civil justice (the only way out left to the priest in the face of the enforceability of the papal decision) was dealt with.