Giovanni Angelo Becciu is not the only cardinal that Pope Francis has sentenced in the manner of an absolute monarch, depriving him of the exercise of his functions without any procedural examination of the accusations and regardless of the fact that the one punished has always declared himself innocent. Because a similar fate has also befallen Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne (in the photo), archbishop emeritus of Lima, Peru.
The punishment dates back to the two-year period of 2018–2019, but news of it came out only recently, following an article on January 25 in the Spanish newspaper “El País” regarding sexual abuse that the cardinal allegedly committed in 1983, when he was an ordinary priest, and that was reported to the pope 35 years later.
The revelations of “El País” have raised a storm of contrasting reactions, with those maintaining innocence on one side, Cardinal Cipriani himself foremost, and on the other those maintaining guilt, including his successor and adversary in Lima, Cardinal Carlos Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio. With the Vatican having confirmed the sanctions inflicted on the alleged culprit.
Cipriani reacted first with a letter to the Spanish newspaper and then again, on January 29, with another letter to the president of the Peruvian episcopal conference, which the day before had declared itself on the pope’s side.
Cardinal Castillo instead addressed the “people of God” on January 28 with a statement of total support for Pope Francis “for his wise way of exercising justice in the Church” and of full trust “in the penal canonical procedures and instruments that the Holy See has used,” against people who instead “refuse to recognize the truth of the facts” and the resulting decisions, putting forward “vain justifications.”
As for the Vatican, it was press office director Matteo Bruni’s turn on January 26 to confirm that “after the acceptance of his resignation as archbishop of Lima,” Cardinal Cipriani “has been subjected to a penal precept with several disciplinary measures relating to his public activity, place of residence, and use of the cardinal’s insignia,” a measure “signed and accepted” by Cipriani himself, which “remains in force, although on specific occasions some permissions have been granted to accommodate requests due to the cardinal’s age and family situation.”
In issuing this statement, the official outlet “Vatican News” summarized Cipriani’s response to “El País” as follows:
“The 81-year-old Cardinal Cipriani, currently residing in Madrid, Spain, described the accusations as ‘completely false’ in a statement. ‘I have committed no crime, nor did I sexually abused anyone in 1983, nor before, nor after,’ he wrote. In his statement, the Cardinal confirmed that a complaint was filed against him in 2018 and that in 2019, without any trial being initiated, he was informed by the Apostolic Nuncio in Peru that the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had imposed several sanctions. These included limitations on his priestly ministry, a requirement for stable residence outside of Peru, and a gag order. ‘I have complied with this so far,’ stated Cardinal Cipriani. The Cardinal said he deemed it ‘serious’ that information ‘apparently originating from confidential documentation’ was being published.”
In short, all that is known about the matter for now is only what some of its protagonists, on opposite sides, have said in recent days. With not a few contradictions and with a background factor that must be taken into account: Cipriani’s membership in Opus Dei.
In Peru, Opus Dei is present in force, with its own university in the city of Piura and with Cipriani as its biggest backer. Born in 1943 in Lima, a basketball star in his youth with roles on the national team, then active in the field of engineering, a member of Opus Dei since 1962, theology studies in Rome and Spain, ordained a priest in 1977, then back in Lima as a professor and spiritual director in the seminary, it was in 1983 that he met several times in confession with a teenager in a state of distress, whom he is alleged to have comforted in part with an unrestrained profusion of kisses and hugs – but nothing more, according to the account of “El País” – which many years later would be charged against him as sexual abuse in a secret denunciation to the pope on the part of the alleged victim.
Already in that distant year of 1983, right after the interruption of the meetings between the two, that young man, through a friend, had brought the accusation of improper acts against his confessor to the regional vicar of Opus Dei at the time, receiving in response the assurance that Cipriani had denied the accusations and if anything his “paternal affection” had been misinterpreted.
But at that time the incident had no follow-up, and nothing blocked the rise of Cipriani, who became vicar of Opus Dei in Peru and then vice chancellor of the University of Piura, but above all he was promoted to bishop by John Paul II in 1988, first in Ayacucho and then from 1999 in Lima, with the cardinal’s purple since 2001.
That of Peru, however, is also a very divided Church, with Opus Dei bitterly opposed above all by the Jesuits. And the election as pope in 2013 of the Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio, already known in Argentina for his enmity, was a heavy blow both for Opus, which would suffer a drastic downsizing during his pontificate, and for Cipriani, who five years later, in the summer of 2018, would be informed by the Vatican that the abuse attributed to him in 1983 had been reported to the pope.
The go-between for the delivery of the letter of denunciation to Pope Francis was the Chilean Juan Carlos Cruz, a journalist, now a member of the pontifical commission for the protection of minors and himself a victim, as an adolescent, of abuse, this indeed legally proven.
However, even today, the name of the author of the complaint and alleged victim is not known, in part because his request, in that same summer of 2018, for a meeting with the vicar of Opus Dei in Peru, this time as well forwarded by a friend of his, was rejected “so as not to interfere in a formal accusation already initiated with the Holy See,” as revealed by the vicar himself, Ángel Gómez-Hortigüela, in a statement last January 26.
The fact is that on January 25, 2019, a few days after Cipriani turned 75, the canonical retirement age for bishops, Pope Francis removed him from the leadership of the archdiocese of Lima, appointing in his place his bitter enemy, Carlos Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio.
Castillo has always exalted as his teacher Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928–2024), the father of progressive liberation theology, and is a theologian himself, with a doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and until 2019 a professorship in Lima at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, a university that was itself the subject of a long-standing conflict with Cardinal Cipriani, who was making efforts to remove its faculty of calling itself “Pontifical” and “Catholic,” and with the Vatican secretariat of state, which found in his favor in 2012, only to then regain both of these titles in 2016 at the behest of Pope Francis.
His adversaries have accused Cardinal Cipriani of everything: his friendship with the autocratic president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, even after his fall from grace; his defense of the former military ordinary, Guillermo Abanto Guzmán, removed in 2012 because it was discovered that he had a child; his defense of the former auxiliary bishop of Ayacucho, Gabino Miranda Melgarejo, removed in 2013 for proven sexual abuse that he maintained was only “imprudent acts”; his defense to the end of the “Sodalitium Christianae Vitae,” suppressed by the Holy See on January 26th for the enormous heap of sexual and psychological abuse accumulated by its founder, Luis Fernando Figari, and his accomplices.
But Cipriani’s true fate after his removal from the archdiocese of Lima hung on the outcome of that charge of sexual abuse, which in fact came to fruition on December 18 of that same 2019 when the nuncio to Peru at the time, Nicola Girasoli, presented him with the request to obey a series of sanctions imposed on him by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith with the approval of the pope.
On the basis of what factual verifications those sanctions had been imposed, Cipriani was not given to know, nor was he sent any documentation of a trial that had never been. He was simply asked to sign the acceptance of those punishments, as in fact he did, adding however “in writing in the same document” that “the accusation was absolutely false,” as he is said to have revealed in his letter to the president of the Peruvian episcopal conference last January 29.
Shortly thereafter, on February 4, 2020, Cipriani met with Pope Francis in Rome and – he would write in his reply to “El País” – “the Holy Father allowed me to resume my pastoral duties,” preaching, administering the sacraments, but always with the obligation to reside far from Peru, as in fact he has done up to now, settling first in Rome and then in Madrid, except for rare returns to his homeland (most recently to receive an award on January 7 from Lima mayor and Opus Dei member Rafael López Aliaga), as well as to maintain silence, broken only after the publication of his alleged misdeeds and the attacks by his adversaries in Peru.
The foremost of his accusers today is precisely his successor in Lima, Castillo, made cardinal by Pope Francis last December, who in his open letter of January 28 goes so far as to write about Cipriani, without naming him:
“Given that in recent months, after serious and detailed investigations, there are people and institutions that refuse to recognize the truth of the facts and the decisions made by the Holy See, we urge everyone to reflect through a journey of conversion that involves the abandonment of vain justifications, stubbornness, and rejection of the truth, which, when it is humbly accepted, makes us all free.”
Curiously, Castillo, a few days before, had been in the running as the favorite in the election of the new president of the Peruvian episcopal conference, where he was instead defeated due in part to the backlash from a controversy regarding a queer show scheduled for January 30 at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, entitled María Maricón, with the Blessed Mother played by a man, a show canceled in the end but defended by the cardinal.
In his place, on January 22, the president elected for the conference was Carlos Enrique García Camader, bishop of Lurín but before that Cipriani’s auxiliary in Lima. But he too held back from coming to the defense of his former archbishop, in the statement issued by his new office on January 28.
“Unfortunately, this is not the first time that a cardinal has been falsely accused, with the narration of scandalous details,” Cipriani wrote in his reply to “El País”.
His allusion is to at least two cases, both featuring cardinals of the highest rank accused of serious sexual abuse that later turned out to be completely insubstantial: the Australian George Pell (1941–2023) and the American Joseph Bernardin (1928–1996).
In both cases, however, their complete innocence was established through legal and public avenues. The complete opposite of the sentence without trial inflicted by Pope Francis on Cipriani, with the confused war that has sprung from it.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
