Beleaguered Cardinal Juan Cipriani has publicly clashed with the bishops’ conference of Peru, asking bishops to rectify a January statement that says abuse allegations against the cardinal are “verified.”
In an open letter last week, the cardinal insisted that it was a “lie” and a “grave mistake” for the country’s bishops’ conference to say his resignation as Lima’s archbishop was connected to the abuse allegations he’s facing at the Vatican.
Cipriani issued a letter to all the bishops of Peru on March 28, tracking issue with a January conference statement which addressed accusations of sexual abuse against him and his 2019 departure from office.
The cardinal said last week he written privately to the bishops’ conference leadership in January, immediately after their public statement.
But Cipriani’s March letter explained he had “waited two months since [his] last letter for a rectification [and] that has not happened” — prompting him to write to the entire national episcopate.
In his March 28 letter to all members of the Peruvian bishops’ conference, Cardinal Cipriani said that several points of the bishops’ Jan. 28 statement about him were false.
The conference letter said that “disciplinary measures were imposed” against Cipriani after “verifying the truthfulness of the facts” concerning allegations of sexual abuse against the cardinal, and added that the pope had “accepted the archbishop emeritus of Lima’s resignation of his episcopal ministry after his 75th birthday and imposed some limitations on his ministry.”
Cipriani demanded the conference make a public rectification, and said the allegations against him had never been investigated, and that he had never been allowed to defend himself in a canonical process.
“Two months have passed since the publication of the statement by the [Peruvian bishops’ conference] that falsely stated that ‘some disciplinary measures were imposed [against me] after verifying the truthfulness of the facts.’ This claim is false… therefore, I write to all the bishops to invite them to rectify,” Cipriani said in his letter.
“It’s untrue that anything has been proven, because there has been no trial, nor any evidence has been presented, nor has there been a defense, or witness, or anything,” he added.
Spanish outlet El País reported on Jan. 25 that Cipriani was the subject of a Vatican-imposed penal precept restricting his ministry following accusations in Peru of sexual abuse against the cardinal dating back to the early 1980s, first made in 2018.
Cipriani, ordained a priest in 1977 and a member of Opus Dei, served as Archbishop of Lima from 1999 until 2019.
Cipriani originally claimed on a Jan. 25 statement that the precept was imposed only verbally on December 2019, but on Jan. 29 he admitted that he did receive — and sign — written notice of a penal precept which imposed formal restrictions on his public ministry and living arrangements in 2019, shortly after his resignation was accepted at the age of 75.
However, Cipriani still claims that the pope verbally lifted the restrictions on his ministry on a Feb. 4, 2020 private audience that was not recorded on the Vatican’s daily bulletin.
Cipriani has previously said that his freedom to continue in public ministry was obvious, and that he had engaged in “extensive pastoral activity” in the years after his 2020 papal audience, including “preaching spiritual retreats, administering sacraments, etc.”
There is considerable evidence of Ciprini’s ongoing public ministry after 2019.
An Aug. 6, 2021, post on the website of Spain’s Torreciudad shrine records that Cipriani visited the pilgrimage site, holding “some meetings with young people who are taking part in summer retreats.”
The cardinal celebrated a Mass for Seville’s Macarena Brotherhood on May 31, 2022.
The Archdiocese of Madrid’s website contains two notices referring to Masses celebrated by Cipriani, on June 26, 2023, and Oct. 15, 2023.
For its part, the Vatican press office has denied that the precept had been lifted by Pope Francis, either formally or informally, though it did acknowledge that “specific permissions have been granted on certain occasions to accommodate requests related to the cardinal’s age and family circumstances.”
In his March letter, Cipriani denied that the imposition of the precept meant the allegations against him had been proven.
“The decree issued by the [then] Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith… mentions there is a fumus delicti, meaning there is a possible suspicion [of a crime] that has not been proven, because they had not been subject to a trial that provides me with the due right to defense,” Cipriani says in his letter.
“As I said before, and I say again, I accepted the restrictions imposed against me reservedly in the precept for the good of the Church, leaving a written record that these accusations against me were false, waiting for the occasion to be able to defend myself, something that has not happened.”
Cipriani also asked the conference to rescind its claim that his resignation was linked to the allegation against him.
“As it is public knowledge, canon law obliges all bishops to resign when they turn 75 years of age… The resignation does not imply or mean that the bishop ‘leaves the episcopal ministry,’ as the statement says, but becomes a bishop emeritus, yet [still] fully a bishop.”
“I waited two months since my last letter for a rectification that has not happened. This is why I have decided to make public to all the members of the bishops’ conference… and not only to the three members of the [conference] presidency who signed the statement.”
Cipriani said the conference’s January statement had “caused grave damage not only against the honor of a cardinal, but to the faithful [they] are pastors of, after affirming a lie.”
Cipriani’s case is the latest in a series of international scandals involving accusations against senior clerics and limited sanctions imposed by the Holy See.
In the wake of the 2018 scandal surrounding former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, it emerged that the Apostolic nuncio to the United States had issued similar preceptive restrictions on the retired former Archbishop of Washington, with similar claims being made that Pope Francis had then informally lifted them.
In 2022, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, a former president of the French bishops’ conference, admitted to behaving “in a reprehensible way” toward a minor girl when he was a pastor in the Archdiocese of Marseille in the late 1980s.
Ricard was at the time a member of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees cases of clerical abuse of minors, as well as serving on the Dicasteries for Divine Worship and for Christian Unity, in all of which he continued to serve for several months, despite the Vatican reportedly imposing a ban on his public ministry.
Despite admitting to abusing a minor, Ricard remains a cardinal and was eligible to vote in a future conclave until he turned 80 in 2024.
Last week, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, told journalists that his department was in the process of trying to appoint judges to preside over the trial of Fr. Marko Rupnik, who is accused of sexual and spiritually abusing dozens of religious sisters over decades.
The current process against Rupnik was only allowed to begin when Pope Francis waived the canonical statute of limitations covering several of his alleged crimes in the face of public outcry.
After an earlier penal process opened by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2019, however, Rupnik was excommunicated in a secret decision, without the penalty being publicly declared, allowing the priest to continue in public ministry and to serve as a senior consultor to Vatican dicasteries.
