The episode of Giuliana Caccia and Sebastián Blanco should haunt Jordi Bertomeu forever because it portrays with devastating clarity to what extent a pontifical commissioner can end up completely losing his sense of prudence, law, and even the ridiculous when he becomes accustomed to exercising power without restraints.
What happened in Peru was not an administrative misunderstanding or an abstract excess of the Curia.
It was an operation personally driven by Bertomeu. And precisely for that reason, it is so scandalous.
Two lay journalists reported to the ordinary courts an alleged violation of professional secrecy after Bertomeu spoke with third parties about a confidential meeting.
Nothing more.
They exercised an elementary right in any rule of law: to go to the courts of their country.
Bertomeu’s response was delusional. Instead of defending himself legally, he decided to turn the canonical machinery into an instrument of personal intimidation.
Threat of excommunication, prohibition from presenting themselves publicly as Catholics, and exorbitant economic sanctions against two journalists whose only “fault” had been to report him civilly.
It is difficult to exaggerate the dimension of the nonsense.
Excommunication is the Church’s maximum penalty, historically reserved for the gravest offenses against the faith and the sacraments.
Bertomeu degraded it to the point of using it as a tool for private pressure to shield himself from a judicial complaint.
There is no serious way to defend such barbarity from canon law. None.
Because someone drafted that grotesque penal precept.
Someone decided that it was reasonable to spiritually threaten two laypeople for going to the courts.
Someone put before an elderly, ill, and increasingly dependent Francisco a document that was improper, legally crude, and ecclesiastically obscene to obtain formal validation.
And that someone was Jordi Bertomeu.
That is precisely what disqualifies him so deeply. It was not a technical error or a debatable interpretation of the law.
It was a demonstration of arrogance and arbitrariness unworthy of a serious canonist.
Bertomeu’s actions convey the image of a man convinced that the pontifical umbrella allowed him any excess, even using excommunication as a tool for personal pressure.
The subsequent scene finished him off.
It was enough for Giuliana Caccia and Sebastián Blanco to explain directly to the Pope what had happened for the entire setup to collapse in a matter of minutes.
“The excommunication does not apply.”
As both journalists recounted, Francisco even signed the revocation of the penal precept with his own hand.
It is difficult to imagine a more complete humiliation for Bertomeu.
The Pope himself had to intervene personally to defuse the absurd bomb that he had built.
The man sent to combat abuses ended up starring in one of the most vulgar, imprudent, and ridiculous episodes remembered in years within the Vatican disciplinary apparatus.
And that can no longer be hidden behind technicalities or bureaucratic excuses.
What happened portrays Bertomeu as the architect of an authoritarian operation that was completely disproportionate, typical of someone who had completely lost his sense of limits, prudence, and the most basic decorum.