"Leo approved beatification process for bishop who let indigenous children touch his genitals"

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...

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...

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...

Labaka was murdered along with Sr. Velásquez by natives of the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1987.