Tegucigalpa, Honduras ? A prominent candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II recently sheltered a priest who is an admitted child molester and now an international fugitive, The Dallas Morning News has learned.

Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez, who heads the Archdiocese of Tegucigalpa, put the Rev. Enrique Vasquez to work in two remote parishes from last year until March. The priest had fled criminal accusations in his native Costa Rica in 1998, had served in at least two U.S. dioceses before running again and spending time at a clergy treatment center in Mexico.

Vasquez helped found a training center for Catholic lay people in the Honduran town of El Paraiso and served as the resident priest in the village of Guinope. He vanished from Guinope days ahead of police after child-protection activists in Costa Rica pressured their government to revive a languishing criminal case.

Tegucigalpa church officials “realized they had a problem, and they got rid of him,” said Interpol Lt. Julian Rivera. The international police organization said it was continuing to search for the 44-year-old priest at the request of the Costa Rican government, but it has not questioned Cardinal Rodriguez.

The cardinal did not respond to written questions from The News and was too busy to be interviewed, said the Rev. Juan Lopez, a top adviser. The cardinal handles all clergy personnel decisions in the archdiocese, including priests’ assignments, Lopez said.

Lopez initially told The News that the priest had never worked in the Tegucigalpa area. But he later softened that stance, saying “I might have seen him” at a meeting of the archdiocese’s priests.

Vasquez’s home bishop in Costa Rica, Angel San Casimiro, said Cardinal Rodriguez did not check with him before putting the wanted man to work. He said he didn’t know how the priest had landed a job in Honduras, although he added that he thought Vasquez had gone there several years ago to stay at another clergy treatment center.

Admitted abuser

Bishop San Casimiro acknowledged that in the mid-1990s, he freed Vasquez to work abroad after the priest admitted to him that he had abused a 10-year-old altar boy. “When I found out he had this problem,” the bishop said, “I confronted him, and he said, ‘Yes, monsignor, I have this problem.'”

The bishop said he had not recommended Vasquez for work elsewhere after the priest was accused in a criminal complaint of abusing the boy.

Bruce Harris, a child-protection advocate with Casa Alianza, a Catholic-affiliated charity with an office in Costa Rica, has been pressing the bishop and Cardinal Rodriguez to reveal what they know about Vasquez. Neither has been forthcoming, he said.

Harris recently bumped into Rodriguez on an airplane and asked again for information. The cardinal said only that Vasquez “left Honduras some time ago” and that he didn’t know where he’d gone, according to Harris.

On the run

Vasquez left the cardinal’s Honduran archdiocese just as he had left Costa Rica in late 1998 and the United States in late 2002: running from the law, as part of a five-and-a-half-year flight from justice.

It isn’t clear how Vasquez managed to elude arrest repeatedly and stay in ministry, but both church and state apparently played a role.

The priest had fled his home country one day after its child-welfare agency formally accused him of molesting the altar boy. Prosecutor Alba Campos said she suspected that “the church helped him escape” Costa Rica. His boss there, Ciudad Quesada Bishop San Casimiro, would not help her locate Vasquez, she said. Bishop San Casimiro disputed that.

Conflicting accounts

The priest then worked in the Archdiocese of New York for about a year, and church officials disagree about whether Vasquez had permission to work in New York. The archdiocese’s spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, said the priest had been rejected despite having a letter from his bishop saying he was in good standing. But the pastor who supervised him said that “we were given the OK” for Vasquez to work.

Vasquez left New York abruptly, telling the pastor that his bishop was recalling him to Costa Rica. Instead, he went to the Archdiocese of Hartford, Conn., where he found sanctuary for about three years.

Hartford church officials then learned about the criminal case and tipped the FBI, which questioned Vasquez without detaining him in October 2002. He then fled the United States.

Vanished again

Once the Costa Rican prosecutor learned that Vasquez was gone, she didn’t ask Interpol to follow his trail, which led to Casa Alberione, a clergy treatment center near Guadalajara, Mexico. Bishop San Casimiro acknowledges that the priest, in a phone call made while driving across America, revealed his destination.

It isn’t clear how long Vasquez was there. But when he left, he told the center’s director he was going home.

“He said he was returning to Costa Rica to face the consequences of his actions,” said the Rev. Ricardo Roqueni, who thought Vasquez had resumed his career in his native country.

San Casimiro didn’t tell the prosecutor that Vasquez had gone to Mexico until she asked, nearly a year later in August 2003.

Around this time, Vasquez began working in Guinope, the Honduran village.

In March, more than five years after the criminal case began, Costa Rica finally issued an arrest warrant. Campos has said she didn’t seek one because she thought she had to know the suspect’s exact location first.

Harris, of the advocacy group Casa Alianza, said that she knew better and that he ultimately got Costa Rica’s attorney general to overrule her.