Global Courant
When the police searched for him and arrested him, Father Fran did not resist. He realized immediately, and not by divine revelation, that he had been discovered.
Father Fran or Father Paco. That’s what he called himself to gain confidence, Francisco Javier Cuenca, a 34-year-old Andalusian priest who was imprisoned in Malaga this week. He is serving time in prison accused of molesting women he sedated and filmed while he sexually abused them.
Days before his arrest, the priest had reported a theft: he went to the Vélez-Málaga police station where he lived and said that three thousand euros and personal material were missing from his computer. And he blamed a woman who would be his “girlfriend.”
What Father Fran did not know was that the content he claimed had been in the General Directorate of the National Police for more than a month.
Francisco Javier Cuenca, a 34-year-old Andalusian priest who was detained in Malaga this week.
He came there after a woman introduced herself as “his partner” at the Women’s Family and Care Unit in Melilla, where Cuenca had been assigned as pastor.
Dismayed, desperate and unashamed to admit that she was a priest’s girlfriend, she handed over a copy of the photos and videos she had discovered on the priest’s computer.
In the filming, which is said to have taken place between 2017 – the year Cuenca was ordained a priest – and 2019, women appear half-naked, sleeping or unconscious. In the videos, they are caressed, touched and sexually abused by Father Fran without the women realizing what is happening to them.
Precise dosage
The abuses were committed in the rectory or in Father Fran’s house.
And the drug he would have used to sedate his victims would have been GHB or liquid ecstasy.
“It can be an absolute depressant for the central system or it can cause a lot of euphoria and a desire for fun,” explained legal expert Eva Milla.
Francisco Javier Cuenca Villalba with a group of priests. He abused his victims in the rectory.
Father Fran needed to know the correct measure of the dose he was using. “It is a drug that can also cause respiratory depression, which leads to death,” Milla clarified.
In Spain, in a third of all sexual assaults against women, the victim’s will is revoked. This aggravating circumstance punishes the attackers with up to 15 years in prison.
Women don’t remember anything
The police located the victims. He managed to identify five. These are women between the ages of 25 and 35.
Some of them recognized themselves in the pictures and denied ever having been ill-treated by the priest.
Others didn’t even dare to see themselves in the videos.
It is believed that Francisco Javier Cuenca would have sedated and attacked many more people.
Father Fran was friendly, outgoing and not at all serious. He organized meetings in his home, spiritual retreats and excursions with the young people of the parishes in which he worked.
He was a restless priest. In just six years as a priest, he went from Malaga, where he was ordained, to Melilla, the autonomous Spanish city on African territory.
At the beginning of this year, he curiously returned to Malaga, where he had no fixed destination. He spent the summer celebrating masses in two towns in the province, Yunquera and El Burgo.
“I’ve been here for five months. We have no evidence that there are victims from the city,” said El Burgo Mayor María Dolores Narváez.
“If the church, the diocese or whoever has knowledge of these events, they should have reported it first. “We’re not sending it to any municipality,” the mayor complained.
Did the diocese know about it?
In January, Father Fran’s “girlfriend” presented the same material that led the police to the highest authority of the diocese of Malaga in Melilla.
But the diocese did not condemn Cuenca. The diocese sent him back to Malaga.
The priest’s move coincided with the time when the diocese was informed of the aberrations that Father Fran was filming.
Diocesan spokesman Antonio Moreno said today that the transfer was made “for health reasons.”
Francisco Javier Cuenca’s ministerial licenses were not revoked so that he could practice as a priest until he was arrested and his case caused an uproar throughout Spain.
“We were not aware of the crime he was accused of,” said the diocese’s spokesman, explaining the statement.
“Considering the admission into preventive detention of a priest from the Diocese of Málaga, allegedly accused of ‘sexual assault on several women whom he sedated and recorded’, the Diocese of Málaga deeply feels the damage that this situation entails” , the text says.
“Touched by the evil inflicted on us, we, as a Catholic community committed to the care and service of all society, especially the weakest and most in need, can only express our pain,” the statement said .
“It reiterates its deepest and strongest condemnation of any kind of humiliation or abuse of women,” he added.
And he assures: “Since the facts became known, this Diocese has cooperated in accordance with the requirements of justice and will continue to offer its cooperation in all necessary steps to facilitate the investigation to clarify the facts.”
Juan Pablo Gallego, the Argentine lawyer who led the trial of priest Julio César Grassi. Photo: Cezaro de Luca
In February last year, the Spanish Bishops’ Conference commissioned the law firm Cremades & Calvo Sotelo to prepare an independent report on sexual abuse in the church and religious institutions.
The audit, which includes Juan Pablo Gallego, the Argentine lawyer who tried and secured the conviction of priest Julio César Grassi, was due to be presented in March this year. Then it was announced that the presentation of the report would be postponed until June. It wasn’t fulfilled either.
A high-profile priest
Father Fran did not avoid the cameras. In June 2017, he posed for an online religious news portal in front of Málaga Cathedral, where he was ordained a priest by the diocese’s current bishop, Jesús Catalá Ibáñez.
“This is the story that Francisco Javier Cuenca Villalba began to write yesterday. The Eucharist began at 11 a.m. sharp, during which he was ordained a priest,” the Objective Pasión portal celebrated on June 25, 2017.
“Cuenca, born in 1990, began his first studies of the Christian faith in 2008,” the article says. Until 2010 he carried out the postulate with the Trinitarian community.”
“Then he moved to the town of Antequera in Málaga, where he completed the novitiate until the following year. And then he returned to the Nasrid city until 2012 – the portal reviewed. Already in 2013 he joined the Major Seminary of Malaga until he was ordained a priest this year.”
Fr to lay the cradle.
Son of a nun
In 2014, when he was still three years away from his ordination, Father Fran was interviewed by the newspaper La Opinión de Málaga.
There he said that his mother Paqui was a Poor Clare sister until she was 30 years old. And he condemned cases of pedophilia and sexual abuse within the church.
“He taught me the faith since I was little,” Cuenca said at the time. I don’t know if this vocation is in my genes, although I am the son of Paqui, one of the Poor Clare nuns who existed in Vélez Málaga for years.”
In this address, the future Father Fran also said of Pope Francis: “The fundamental thing is that the new Pope recognizes that the Church must change its language to act more as a witness.” “Get out,” he pointed out. Benedict said it very well: no one is a Christian because of their ideology, but because of their encounter with Christ. “We have to reach people, be close.”
And he condemned the abuses in the church: “These pedophile scandals are a disgrace. It is important that the Church made the decision to place them in the hands of the judiciary,” said Cuenca, then a seminarian.
Father Fran also did not move when, having just arrived in Melilla, he was filmed during the ceremony in which he assumed the office of parish priest of the parish of Santa María Micaela de Melilla. “I will follow the discipline common to the entire church and obey the laws,” he said from the pulpit in front of the altar.
Today he is incarcerated in the Alhaurín de la Torre prison, one of the 14 penitentiaries in Andalusia.
“It is clear to me that God has a plan for you from the moment you are born,” Father Fran said before his “girlfriend” found the videos he had hidden on his computer.
