Father Carlos Martins exonerated

Gavin Ashenden • August 15, 2025

As it happened, a week ago or so, I was sitting in the well-upholstered and elegant library of St Jean Baptiste Church in Manhattan, in the Upper East Side, with Fr Carlos Martins. I was able to ask him about the difficulties the last eight months had posed since he had to pause his ministry after having had what proved, as expected, to be unfounded accusations

I was in New York to plan a dramatic and rather exciting programme called Reclaiming Christendom that he and I, with one or two other colleagues, are planning to put together for launching later this year. But like everything else, it has had to be paused until the false charges were dropped and he was restored to his ministry.

False, because the charges have been wholly withdrawn. And so finally the process of taking up his life, commitments and future plans can begin again.

Our readers will remember that in November 2024, the Catholic Herald was one of the first Catholic outlets to publish in his defence when suddenly he was accused of battery during his well-publicised and very popular relics tour. He had touched a braid of the hair of one of the group he was talking to, and all hell broke loose. Perhaps literally.

It won’t surprise anyone that the opportunity to censure, criticise and cancel proved irresistible. The police, having initially refused to have anything to do with the case, were pressured into bringing charges. Battery was the only charge that could be brought in the circumstances. In terms of the criminal law, it covers any kind of physical contact without express or implied permission.

In the highly politicised and feral atmosphere of American lawfare, the complexities of who joined what side made it increasingly difficult to deal with as a simple matter of legal fact.

The police, having originally declined to press charges, found pressure being put on them until they felt unable to resist. There was no sexual element to the event. Only the touching of a braid of hair in a public place, which was translated into a criminal charge.

The context was a public event in a crowded church, where Father Martins, while talking, teaching and bantering with a group of students and adults at an exhibition in a church, made what he intended to be a humorous comment comparing his baldness to a student’s long hair, which he momentarily touched.

The whole event took place in the presence of a significant number of witnesses, including clergy, educators, volunteers, and other students. The tragic and dangerous element was that this mundane incident was initially and immediately mischaracterised and distorted by different news outlets.

Finally, however, after months of waiting, stress and intended public embarrassment, the anti-Catholic energies ran out of steam. The political opponents gave way before the banality and mundanity of the facts, and at the beginning of August, the lawfare ceased, justice emerged, and finally a public announcement was made that Father Carlos Martins had been cleared of all charges.

‘I am deeply grateful to all who offered their prayers and support during this time,’ said Father Martins. ‘I am thankful for the truth coming to light and look forward to resuming my ministry and continuing to preach the Gospel.’

His legal representatives announced:

‘The Will County State’s Attorney’s Office, the same entity that charged him with a crime, withdrew those charges and dismissed the case on its own motion without any finding of any wrongdoing or criminal liability on the part of Fr Martins. This is exactly the result we were expecting. What he was charged with was simply absurd.’

Marcella Burke, Chairman of Burke Law Group and his defence attorney, commented:

‘This was a case that never should have been brought forward. The court’s ruling is a full vindication of Fr Martins’ innocence from the beginning of any and all criminal wrongdoing.’

‘Since the beginning, we have maintained that Fr Martins has been completely innocent of all wrongdoing. His character and vocation were wrongly called into question. We’re grateful the justice system corrected this mistake,’ added Patrick Kenneally of Burke Law Group.”

The stakes of being a popular or populist figure as a Catholic are very high. Fr Martins’ podcast, The Exorcist Files, has had over seven million downloads.

His tour of Catholic relics has been hosted in over 200 dioceses; an exposition involves over 150 relics from every period of the Church’s history. As you might expect, this is not just a historical tour, but the unleashing of the power of holiness amongst the people. As a result, scores of miracles have been claimed.

It required no great leap of imagination to notice that if one subscribes to a theological worldview in which good and evil are pitted against one another, then one of the Catholic Church’s most effective exorcists might well attract adverse interest.

And yet at the same time, the scale of child abuse by Catholic clergy has been so horrendously problematic, with perpetrators remaining undealt with as part of the residue of the last pontificate, that the public and private capacity to distinguish real abuse from false accusation has become severely diminished.

No reduction in suspicion on behalf of children can be entertained. But we are simple moral creatures. Such ethical abuse often provokes a profound instinctive response. In fact, it drives an emotive response that, while starting with a desire for justice, bleeds into revenge.

Indeed, the most obvious example of this was the judicially enabled lynching of Cardinal Pell in Australia. It was a platform of his defence that, given the constraints of liturgical dress, time, place and public scrutiny, the acts he was accused of were simply impossible as well as being untrue. But this did not stop him being tried and convicted as well as reputationally lynched by public opinion. The public, scandalised and outraged by the stories of abuse, wanted the conviction of a senior prelate to satisfy the perceived need for justice.

In the grander arena of the conflict between good and evil, the danger of false accusation will always threaten those who do good and place themselves at the forefront of the struggle. Even if the secular instincts of the mob cannot be relied on to distinguish between justified and unjustified suspicion, and the judicial and police authorities are not free from political prejudice and ideological rage, the Church must do all that it can on the one hand to hold perpetrators to account, and on the other to defend the innocent with all its resources.

There should be widespread celebration that Fr Carlos has been freed from the unjust burdens of ideological warfare, and a recognition of the power and potency of his ministry and the effectiveness of reliquary and all it contains and achieves.