Story by Emily Mangiaracina/ Life Site News
A “missionary” bishop made “Venerable” and green-lighted for the beatification process by Pope Leo XIV allowed indigenous youth to touch his genitals and shared a bed naked with a youth who had previously made “provocative homosexual attempts,” recently published reports show.
In May 2025, Leo declared Msgr. Alejandro Labaka “Venerable” along with Sr. Inés Arango Velásquez, with whom he worked. InfoCatolica recently highlighted concerning passages in Labaka’s autobiographical writings in which the bishop recounted his observations of disordered sexual practices of the Huaorani people in the Amazon. Of particular concern is one time when he admittedly allowed the indigenous youth to arouse him.
He recounted in the Huaorani Chronicle, according to InfoCatólica:
The young people were more playful than ever, abound in words and signs that figured the union of sexes, allowing touches on the genitals. This time they especially bothered me, until confirming with uproar that male reactions are identical between us and the Huaorani. In any case, they did not insist either with me or among themselves in a way that pollution occurred. I tried not to make any drama and made an effort to act with naturalness, laugh with them and dissuade them from the game (CH, 146).
This incident was facilitated by the fact Labaka habitually lived nude with the Huaorani, in order to “adapt” to their culture. As he explained in the Huaorani Chronicle, “They lived naked and I too was often naked like them.” Instead of approaching their nudism from the point of view of Catholic teaching, which understands clothing to be a necessary safeguard following original sin, Labaka claimed that the Huaorani did not need clothes in their “natural morality.”
“Blessed nudism of the Huaorani, who do not need cloths to safeguard their norms of natural morality!” Labaka wrote. “God has wanted to preserve in this people the way of life, the natural morality as in Paradise before sin,” he claimed, even going so far as to call the Huaorani’s culture as one of “extraordinary sexual maturity.”
This claim that the Huaorani did “not need” clothing and lived a “morality as in Paradise before sin” is at odds with Labaka’s description of the youth’s regular, disordered sexual experimentation. He recalled in the Huaorani Chronicle:
I observed the ease, or rather the almost generalized practice as something ritual, of getting excited among males frequently … in addition to other homosexual-looking games in their long family gatherings … Starting from their reality required me to bathe with them or like them, or in the sight of young people and children, with complete naturalness; intentionally performing the full grooming of an adult male; allowing to satisfy the natural curiosity to touch and see in what they see us different.
Labaka also admitted to “lying down naked” in bed with a youth who he said had previously made homosexual advances.
“Peigo (a young Huaorani) stayed, apparently, without a hammock and approached my bed. On previous days I had rejected him, for I feared him because of his gestures and provocative homosexual attempts. This time I had another understanding of ‘accept everything, except sin’ and I shared the bed lying down naked under the same mosquito net,” wrote the bishop.
Father Dave Nix ripped Labaka for allowing the youth to touch his genitals in a repost of Chris Jackson’s commentary on Pope Leo’s elevation of Labaka via the canonization process.
“Anytime there is genital contact between an adult and a child, the adult is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS the predator, even if he acts coy like this pervert,” Nix wrote.
Jackson observed, “The duty to avoid scandal does not dissolve because a culture has different customs. A missionary can learn a language, eat what is set before him, sleep in a hut, accept poverty, accept danger, accept martyrdom. He does not get to sanctify conditions that predictably invite sexual sin, especially in the presence of the young.”
“The conduct described is egregiously disordered and scandalous. The very telling of it, written as though the ‘difficulty’ is maintaining composure while being touched, reveals the rot … Saints do not flirt with fire and call the smoke ‘inculturation.’”
These autobiographical writings alone call into question whether Labaka’s work in the Amazon can be described as “missionary” and evangelistic in purpose. InfoCatólica reported that he did not in fact seek to evangelize, but in his own words, “to receive from them all the ‘seeds of the Word’ hidden in his real life and in his culture, where the unknown God lives.”
Labaka was murdered along with Sr. Velásquez by natives of the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1987.
