GRANADA, Spain — David Ramírez Castillo first met his parish priest, the Rev. Román Martínez, as a 7-year-old catechism student. Later, he became one of his altar boys. Step by step, Mr. Ramírez says, the priest convinced him that to deepen his faith he should spend more time with him and the other clergy members.
What started as afternoon visits after Mass turned into overnight stays and weekends away in a shared bed, including at the Summit, a private hilltop villa complete with a swimming pool, he says.
There, Mr. Ramírez, now 25 and still a Catholic, says he was repeatedly abused by Father Martínez or made to watch him and others, including several priests, perform sex over three years, starting in 2004 when he was 14. The priests deny the accusations, and a lawyer representing them called the charges “invented.”
Nevertheless, the case, which includes allegations of a sex ring and a cover-up involving as many as 10 priests — accusations supported by one other plaintiff as well as by several witnesses — has become one of the most serious sexual abuse scandals to emerge under Pope Francis.
It has also become a prime example of the more open and assertive approach to the issue of clergy sexual abuse that Pope Francis has taken as he shifts the tone in a Vatican long criticized for neglecting decades of abuses by priests in parishes around the world.
Though the Vatican’s record remains mixed in following up on the numerous sexual abuse cases that precede this one, Mr. Ramírez wrote the pope about his claims last August, he said. Just days later, the pope called him, encouraging him to pursue his complaints, and then personally ordered an investigation into the case, demanding complete transparency.
“I told him, ‘Go to the bishop tomorrow,’ and then I wrote to the bishop and told him to start an investigation,” the pope told a Spanish reporter in November on his plane from Strasbourg, France, where he had addressed the European Parliament.
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Mr. Ramírez, the prime accuser in the case, far from cutting loose from the church, is now a member of Opus Dei, a Catholic movement that has significant influence in Spain, where it was founded in 1928.
His lawyer, Jorge Aguilera, suggested that his client had felt unable to report the abuse while in Granada but had found it “easier from a thousand kilometers away,” after deciding to move last year to Pamplona, in northern Spain, to complete a doctorate in psychology at the University of Navarra, which has close ties to Opus Dei.
The Granada judge leading the sexual abuse investigation must soon decide whether to maintain the charges against those who have been indicted. “The main problem we face is the delay in filing the complaint,” Mr. Aguilera said. Because of the lapse in time, he said, the judge might clear six of the priests accused of cooperating in sexual abuse, rather than performing it, because such lighter crimes fall within Spain’s statute of limitations.
No matter how the case is settled, however, for the parishioners here the stain of the accusations will not be removed as easily as the graffiti insulting pedophiles that was recently whitewashed from the outside wall of the church of San Juan María Vianney, where Father Martínez had celebrated Mass.
Nearby, some parents, who were picking up their children from a school run by nuns, said they were struggling to come to terms with the scandal.
“I don’t understand how anybody religious could hurt somebody, let alone a child,” said Úrsula Muñoz, as she held her 4-year-old daughter, Martina. She said she still intended to take her daughter to her First Communion. But she added, “I certainly plan on doing it at her school rather than in a church.”
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome, and Laurie Goodstein from New York.
