Despite initially giving a different
account, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne’s clarified this week that
he did sign a written set of restrictions on his ministry over
allegations of sexual abuse, after all.
While
that concession is interesting, it doesn’t bring any real clarity to a
complex case unfolding in the news this week, or explain why and how he
continued in public ministry for years after his ministry was supposedly
restricted.
And the cardinal’s admission
to being handed a formal penal precept back in 2019 highlights again a
pattern of sanctions being imposed on senior clerics without either
resolving the cases against them, or effectively restricting their
ministry.
A growing list of international
scandals appears to highlight a continued climate of dysfunction and
special treatment for senior churchmen while delivering little in the
way of justice or resolution, either for the accused or for his alleged
victims.
And, given the refusal of the
Vatican to answer pressing and reasonable questions about how such cases
have been dealt with, and why, many may now conclude that the
dysfunction is intentional, despite Pope Francis’ legal reforms to the
canonical process.
Cardinal
Cipriani, the former Archbishop of Lima, publicly confirmed last week
that he is accused of sexual abuse dating back to the early 1980s, while
maintaining his absolute innocence.
In a series of statements, the cardinal has said he has not been given details about the accusations.
Cipriani
first denied, then confirmed receiving written restrictions on his
ministry from the Vatican in 2019, though he maintains these were lifted
verbally by Pope Francis in 2020 — which the Vatican has denied, while
saying that some case by case exceptions were made “to accommodate
requests related to the cardinal’s age and family circumstances.”
Cipriani’s
case has thrown up numerous and obvious contradictions, which neither
the cardinal’s statements, nor the Vatican’s appear to address fully.
While
he now concedes that he was handed a written precept restricting his
ministry in 2019, the cardinal maintains Pope Francis privately and
verbally lifted its restrictions a few months later — which would come
as a surprise, given that the two have some history of disagreement in
South America.
The Vatican has said that, “specific permissions” notwithstanding, the restrictions were never lifted and remain in force.
In
either event, since his retirement the cardinal has maintained a very
public ministerial schedule in Spain, where he has lived since leaving
office in Lima in 2019, leading retreats, celebrating Mass in the
cathedral in Madrid, and engaging in what he himself called “extensive
pastoral activity.”
Absent official
clarification, which is unlikely to be forthcoming from the pope, it is
impossible to know to what, if any, extent Francis lifted the
restrictions on Cipriani, formally or informally.
But
without making any assessment of the allegations against Cardinal
Cipriani — and according to him he has not been afforded any opportunity
to defend himself or even read the accusations he faces — it can
reasonably be asked what is the point of imposing restrictions on a
cardinal, in secret, and then either immediately lifting them or
allowing him to live in open disregard of them?
Such
a situation does not, in any way, serve as a preventative measure —
which is the supposed legal function of a canonical precept. Nor does it
serve to validate the accuser, in as much as it serves no public or
practical function or stem from any legal finding of guilt.
Similarly,
it does not vindicate the accused since, as Cardinal Cipriani has
found, the accusations and restrictions can still find their way into
the public forum.
But perhaps the most
concerning — even infuriating for many Catholics — aspect of Cipriani’s
case is that it cannot credibly be defended as either unforeseen or an
example of the Vatican attempting to “learn as it goes” in a complicated
situation.
On the contrary, it is in
many respects all too familiar. It is hard for many to ignore the
parallels with the McCarrick scandal of 2018, during which it emerged
that the former Washington archbishop had been subject to a similar,
privately issued penal precept from the Vatican which, like Cipriani, he
appeared either free to disregard or had privately and informally
lifted by the pope.
In between those two
instances, there is a long list of comparable attempts at informal,
private, or partial justice being applied to senior churchmen accused of
the most serious crimes.
Also in 2019,
Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard retired as the Archbishop of Bordeaux,
France only to admit in 2022 that he had sexually abused a 14-year-old
girl 35 years earlier.
French prosecutors later closed
a case against the cardinal due to the statute of limitations, but the
Vatican took more than a year to open an investigation — even after the
cardinal’s public admission — during which time he was reportedly barred
from public ministry, though no formal declaration of this was ever
made.
In the interim, he continued to
serve as a member of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the
curial department meant to be in charge of dealing with his admitted
crime.
The cardinal finally resigned — he
was not terminated — as a member of the DDF in 2023. Though he has
since remained a cardinal legally in good standing and was eligible to
vote in a conclave until he turned 80 in September last year.
Ricard’s
public admission of guilt came shortly after it emerged that another of
his French episcopal colleagues, Bishop Michel Santier, had resigned in
2021 following accusations of spiritual abuse, though he was allowed to publicly cite “health reasons” for stepping down.
And
the news of Cardinal Cipriani’s case comes hot on the heels of the DDF
prefect, Cardinal Fernandez, giving an update on the slow-rolling and
probably most well known sexual abuse case of recent years, that of Fr.
Marco Rupnik.
Rupnik is, of course, only
currently facing a penal process at all because decades of allegations
of the worst kind of blasphemous sexual abuse finally broke into the
public domain, forcing Pope Francis to lift the statute of limitations in 2023.
But
for many, the most galling aspect of Rupnik’s case isn’t the current
slow progress, or even the public outcry which was needed to allow it to
go forward. Rather it is the fact that he was actually tried for crimes
of abuse by the DDF in 2019, in secret, and then excommunicated —
equally secretly — while he was allowed to continue as a senior advisor
to Vatican dicasteries and maintain a full, international slate of
public events and appearances.
Many point
back also to the case of Bishop Gustavo Oscar Zanchetta, who was
accused of sexual abuse of seminarians and who was initially allowed to
resign as Bishop of Oran for “health reasons” in 2017, with Pope Francis
creating a special position for him in the Roman curia, naming him
assessor at the Administration for the Patrimony of the Apostolic See
and allowing him to live in the Domus Sanctae Marta, the Vatican hotel
and retreat house where Pope Francis also lives.
Zanchetta,
who was one of the first episcopal appointments made by the pope after
his election in 2013, subsequently faced criminal charges in his native
Argentina, returning to stand trial in 2022.
But
despite measures taken by Pope Francis to declassify Church documents
on cases of sexual abuse, including a 2020 Vatican policy requiring
diocesan bishops to cooperate with judicial orders, the Vatican’s Zanchetta files were never released to the court and the judges elected to proceed with the trial without them.
After Zanchetta’s conviction, he was sentenced to four years in prison — but received no public sanction from the Church. Instead,
Church authorities supported his release from prison on “medical
grounds” and allowed him to live in a retired priests’ home.
Even
more recently, the Vatican has refused to answer questions about why,
and on whose authority, the pope’s chief of staff, Archbishop Edgar Peña
Parra, attempted
last year to overturn a canonical process laicizing another Argentine
cleric convicted and laicized for the sexual abuse of minors.
Since
the breaking of the McCarrick scandal in 2018, Pope Francis has made a
series of public statements and supposedly landmark canonical reforms
aimed at strengthening the Church’s canonical mechanisms for dealing
with abuse — including and especially accusations concerning senior
clerics.
However, at the same time, the
practical track record of major cases has suggested that a climate of
selective and secret justice remains at the highest levels of the
Church.
After more than six years, the
conclusion many have reached is that the law — including due process for
alleged victims and accused alike — is only for those without
influence.
If that narrative isn’t
challenged it could end up being the central legacy of a pontificate
which has pitched itself as a time of real reform.
