The pope’s 007 reveals (by mistake) the enormous skeleton in Leo XIV’s cupboard
Jordi Bertomeu, the pope’s anti-abuse “policeman”, defended Prevost against accusations of covering up for the paedophile Father Lute. Yet the pope really did save him. With a device used in at least 1,058 other cases
How many paedophile priests does the Church have to deal with? How does it deal with them, and what becomes of them? The answer beggars belief, and comes from none other than one of the foremost experts on clerical abuse, Jordi Bertomeu, a close friend of Pope Prevost. As Giorgio Meletti recounts in this detailed article, which I urge you to read carefully, Bertomeu explains that the pope can grant “the grace of dispensation from the clerical state” to priests accused of sexual abuse: this avoids a canonical trial, and the offence vanishes as though it had never been committed. The victims? What do they matter? They have no right to information about the outcome of their complaints anyway, and if the pope wishes to grant the culprit a dispensation to extinguish his guilt, his decision is beyond appeal. If you think this “get-out-of-jail-free card” is a rarely used expedient, you are mistaken. Bertomeu himself supplies the figures: in the last nine years alone, a paedophile priest was pardoned every three days. So much for zero tolerance. Federica Tourn