Father Fernando Suarez, a locally famous Catholic priest who was recently cleared of sexual abuse charges by the Vatican, died yesterday of a massive heart attack after collapsing during a tennis tournament in Alabang, his spokeswoman confirmed.
Deedee Siytangco, of Suarez’s Missionaries of Mary of the Poor ministry, told DZMM late yesterday that the 52-year-old priest was playing at the Alabang Country Club in an annual tournament when he blacked out. He was rushed to the Asian Hospital Medical Center in Muntinlupa, where he was declared dead at around 3pm.
Siytangco said that besides Suarez’s previously existing illnesses of goiter and gout, his peers and family considered him “generally healthy.” She added that the priest would have been 53 on Friday.
“Three weeks ago he got an acquittal from the Vatican,” Siytangco said, referring to accusations of sexual abuse that had been leveled against Suarez. “So the Vatican wrote that he was not guilty.”
Suarez had been accused of sexual impropriety by two altar boys in Mindoro Occidental in 2014.
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Even before the accusations, though, Suarez courted controversy with his “healing masses,” which were attended by crowds of thousands in the hopes of being cured of various illnesses. This, coupled with the revelation of the altar boys’ accusations, earned him the disapproval of the country’s bishops, who banned him from performing his unorthodox masses in at least four dioceses in the country for five years.
Following his acquittal by a Vatican tribunal, Suarez had requested his critics lift the ban.
