A preliminary observation is essential, to establish at once the subject under discussion here. In recent days we have learnt that, over the nine years from 2012 to 2020, comprising precisely 3,288 days, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith opened, on every day that God sent upon this earth (absit iniuria verbis), two ecclesiastical criminal proceedings for sexual offences committed by priests against underage victims. Two a day. During the same period, the pope, understood strictly as an individual person (Mr Joseph Ratzinger in 2012 and Mr Jorge Mario Bergoglio for the following eight years), granted a defendant a dispensatio ab oneribus (a kind of “pardon” that extinguishes the proceedings) every three days. Every three days, a paedophile priest was pardoned. One every three days.
This is why it is not merely legitimate but imperative to remember always that the Catholic Church is obsessed with the sexual abuse it itself perpetrates. A tragedy that dominates its life every day, every thought at every moment, despite the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s efforts to appear blithely occupied with other matters. Although it is true that, with Leo XIV, every effort at concealment is becoming futile: the pope from Chicago is accustoming us to truly absurd stories.
The extraordinary contradiction surrounding the Rupnik case (Saturday 12 September: solemn inauguration, with a papal blessing, of the mosaics at Aparecida in Brazil; Saturday 26 September: a visit to Lourdes, with the serial abuser’s mosaics covered up in agreement with the pope) pales beside the astonishing revelation by a Madrid lawyer, Javier Tebas, of how Leo XIV managed to save his friend Eleuterio Vásquez Gonzáles, known as Father Lute, from extremely serious accusations of paedophilia.
Given the complexity of the affair, it is best to begin at the beginning: 8 May 2025, the day Robert Prevost was elected pope. Immediately after the white smoke, reports began circulating about the case of the three Quispe sisters, who in 2020, in Chiclayo, Peru, had gone to the then Bishop Prevost to report the sexual abuse they had suffered as children, beginning at the age of nine, at the hands of Father Lute. Prevost was accused of having done nothing—in essence, of having covered up for him.
A VISIT TO THE POPE’S HOME
Jordi Bertomeu, a Catalan official in the disciplinary section of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), immediately came to Prevost’s defence. In October 2021, Vanity Fair España described him as “one of the key men in Francis’s circle, probably one of those whom the pope trusts most in the Vatican, a kind of 007 tasked by the pontiff with investigating the most intricate cases of child abuse by priests and bishops”. Jordi “007” Bertomeu is also such a close friend of Prevost that, on the morning of 9 May, he was among the first to speak with the newly elected pope in his apartment in the Palace of the Holy Office. Bertomeu became friends with Prevost in Peru, where together they fought the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, an apostolic movement founded by the layman Luis Figari and dissolved by Francis in early 2025 for sexual abuse and violations of almost every commandment. For Bertomeu, the accusations of covering up for Father Lute are fabrications by members of the Sodalitium seeking revenge against Prevost.
Did they discuss the troublesome Father Lute affair that morning in the Palace of the Holy Office? Obviously we do not know, but the fact remains that Bertomeu left Prevost’s home and rushed to give two very similar radio interviews to two Catalan stations, Radio Estel and Rac1. He told Radio Estel: “I think no one can say this with the knowledge of the facts that I have. Since 2012, I have been following abuse cases in Latin America, particularly those in Peru and, specifically, the two Chiclayo cases being most widely stirred up at present. I no longer know what language to say it in: I am saying it in Catalan now, and in recent days I have said it in several other languages. It is false. Categorically false. Prevost has never covered up any case.”
The case of the three Quispe sisters is highly contentious. The eldest of the three sisters, Ana Maria, has never withdrawn her accusations against Prevost, but the pope and his friends believe she is being manipulated by the Sodalitium. Exactly a year ago, in Prevost’s authorised biography, Citizen of the World, published on 14 September 2025 to mark his seventieth birthday, the author Elise Ann Allen devoted no fewer than 25 pages to Ana Maria Quispe’s accusations, concluding: “Contrary to other testimonies cited in this book, Ana María maintains that, although the diocese [that is, Prevost—editor’s note] opened the case, it did not conduct an investigation, on the pretext that ‘there is no way to investigate within the Church’. However, as the Vatican has confirmed, a file does indeed exist in Rome, which would demonstrate that an investigation was conducted. Quispe insists that the dossier contains only ‘one sheet of paper’, which would mean, in her view, that there was no adequate investigation.” In short, Allen cannot call Quispe a liar and, while alluding to possible manipulation, leaves the reader with some doubts about Prevost: “Ultimately, what emerges clearly is that this is not an abuse case like so many others, but one in which a genuine effort to help the victims collided with many particular interests, both personal and institutional, with the election of Pope Leo XIV, and, amid all this, three women were left bewildered, feeling used.”
THE PAPAL PARDON FOR FATHER LUTE
Since the clergy like to “do it differently”, after the storm of venom that accompanied his election Robert Prevost did not spare his audience another dramatic twist. In November 2025, he granted Father Lute the dispensatio ab oneribus, or “grace of dispensation from the clerical state”, a stroke of genius that even the most sophisticated theologians struggle to make sense of. It works like this: if a priest is on trial for sexual violence against minors before the DDF tribunal, he can ask the pope to be laicised, even provisionally. The proceedings then end as though the defendant had died: where there is no longer a priest, there is no longer an ecclesiastical trial. The Quispe sisters were informed through informal channels that Lute had requested the “pardon” two days after Bergoglio’s death, prompting them to make a naïve appeal to the new pope not to grant the so-called “pardon” that would deny them their right to justice. Prevost, surely after extensive discernment, simply did not give a damn about the three little girls who had been raped, and pardoned his old friend Father Lute. The news reached the Quispe sisters on a small slip of paper (somewhat crumpled, they say), because Prevost has refused to meet them for five years: as a rule, this pope meets abuse victims only if they have been selected from among the meekest and those most thoroughly pasteurised by their local pastors. The Quispe sisters have not yet been pasteurised.
[Note that, in the Italian conception of law, a pardon by definition follows a conviction, whereas in the Church’s conception a papal pardon erases everything: guilt, sins, documents, proceedings, penalties, compensation and victims, who do not even have the right to see the records. In legal terms, this is the point at which the figure of the pope and that of the Marquis del Grillo coincide.]
And so we come to the sensational revelation packaged for the pope’s seventy-first birthday by Javier Tebas, the Madrid lawyer representing the Quispe sisters.
Tebas wrote on Infovaticana - a Spanish website that the good Christians surrounding Prevost daily denigrate as a “purveyor of hoaxes, nonsense and fake news” because it has it in for the pope, which may well be true, but the facts remain - that Bertomeu himself published an essay in 2021 in Ius Canonicum, the University of Navarra’s journal of canon law, devoted to the practice of dispensation from clerical obligations (it can be read here).
In this essay, Bertomeu shows that, within the Church’s complex system of thought, dispensation from clerical obligations serves precisely to erase sexual abuse proceedings without leaving any trace in the DDF archives. He approaches the subject on the understanding that the sexual abuse of minors by priests is so widespread a phenomenon that it must be managed statistically (“70 per cent of abused minors are adolescent boys and 20 per cent adolescent girls”) and that it overwhelms the Church’s structures: “The impossibility—and not merely the difficulty—for many Ordinaries of conducting a judicial penal process under canon 1721, owing to a lack of human and technical resources, was a far more widespread circumstance than some members of the Curia or scholars would ever have wished to acknowledge.” A warning: we are speaking of reported abuse that leads to the opening of ecclesiastical proceedings, which accounts for only a small proportion of actual cases. On the basis of Bertomeu’s figures, it seems plausible to suppose that between five and ten minors are abused by Catholic priests every day. Every day.
THE POPE’S ABSOLUTE POWER
According to Bertomeu, although the device of laicising the abuser to erase proceedings has no legal basis, it can nevertheless “be regarded as a practice possessing normative force, by virtue of the Roman Pontiff’s specific approval of each dispensation granted”. Behind this phrase lies a terrifying reality: despite the proliferation of laws, constitutions, codes and canons of every kind, the only law truly in force in the Church is that the pope’s power is absolute and unlimited. And so this practice, Bertomeu admits, “not only avoids reaching an authoritative declaration on whether or not the accused is guilty, but inevitably means that the alleged victim cannot obtain redress for the harm caused by the aggressor”. Yet this is how things are done because the pope wills it: “a practice possessing normative force” means that something illegal becomes legal if it pleases the pope.
Here comes the most chilling passage. Bertomeu explains that the victims must resign themselves to it: their right to justice and reparation is not the only one with which the Church must concern itself. His exact words are worth reading: “The faithful may responsibly refrain from asserting a personal right if, in the particular case, they thereby safeguard ecclesial communion, since this, through the work of the Spirit, possesses an organic character analogous to that of a living and functioning body. Faced with the possibility that a cleric may request the dispensatio ab oneribus, should the alleged victim’s right to obtain recognition of the defendant’s guilt (cf. can. 1341) prevail and, consequently, should the dispensation be refused and the ongoing proceedings instead be brought to a conclusion? Or should precedence be given to the ecclesial community’s right to remove from pastoral ministry an ordained man who, during the preliminary investigation or the criminal proceedings, has implicitly acknowledged his unfitness to dispense the mysteries of God in the service of the people of God?”
Those without a degree in theology lack the intellectual tools to understand why the Church is protected by laicising paedophile priests before trial but not also afterwards. The fact remains, however, that thanks to the “Bertomeu formula”, paedophile priests get away with it and victims are mercilessly told to go to hell in the name of the good of the Church, which, as all good Christians know, matters more than the rights of a child raped at the age of eight.
It is therefore unsurprising that the lawyer Tebas, confronted with these obscene arguments from the self-styled anti-paedophile 007, should respond in a furious tone: the three Quispe sisters were abused by Father Lute at the ages of nine, eleven and thirteen respectively, and Leo XIV decided to shield him from ecclesiastical trial, without giving any explanation to these three women or to their parents, who had entrusted them to the Church.
Bertomeu himself supplies the shameful figures. The DDF official knows everything and reels off, in an academic essay, figures that, if a journalist asks the Vatican press office for them, prove to be shrouded in the most impenetrable secrecy. In any event, reading Ius Canonicum, Tebas found the figures: between 2012 and 2020, 6,236 case files were opened at the DDF, and 1,058 ended with the granting of a “dispensatio ab oneribus”, 17 per cent of all cases, with an annual average of 117. The acceleration during Bergoglio’s pontificate is striking: dispensations rose from 79 in 2012 (Ratzinger’s last year) to 179 in 2020, more than doubling in eight years. “In plain terms: more than a thousand cases of child abuse that reached the Church’s supreme tribunal were closed without anyone establishing what happened, and the pace is increasing,” Tebas explains.
POPE FRANCIS’S LIES
On 22 September 2017, Pope Francis solemnly proclaimed “zero tolerance” for paedophile priests before the cameras. Here are his exact words: “Never a pardon for priests and religious convicted of paedophilia! Those convicted of sexually abusing minors can appeal to the Pope for a pardon, but I have never signed one of these and never will. I hope that is clear.” Perfectly clear! He signed only 979 of them between 2013 and 2020, according to the figures officially supplied by his anti-paedophile 007. Perhaps he meant: “I shall never sign more than two a week,” since that is the strict limit to which he rigorously adhered. If we were speaking of a politician, we would call him a liar and an impostor. Since it is the pope, we shall leave that to the faithful.
Tebas charges: “Behind those thousand case files are, at the very least, a thousand people who reported abuse and received no answer. There is probably more than one per file. Thousands of men and women, in any event, to whom the very system that encouraged them to come forward then denied the truth and reparation.” But how many trials have been made to evaporate through papal dispensation since 2020? How many paedophiles have been pardoned by Bergoglio and Prevost? A pontifical secret, at least until Bertomeu writes another academic essay with updated figures. The only publicly available news is that Leo XIV pardoned Father Lute, the parish priest of Chiclayo whom he himself ought to have brought to trial.
And here the devil (who, as Bergoglio assured us, does exist) has a hand in things. An apologetic book about Prevost and his years in Peru has appeared, The Shepherd and the Wolves by Santiago Roncagliolo, which, perhaps through an oversight, lets slip a couple of interesting details about the relationship between Prevost and Father Lute. Once again, it is Infovaticana that notices: “In recounting the relationship between Bishop Prevost and Father Lute—at the time the most popular priest in the diocese, a promoter of devotion to the Miraculous Child of Eten—Roncagliolo writes: ‘Fighting together brought the bishop and the priest very close. Father Lute kept him informed of everything he did. And Bishop Prevost was proud of his achievements. Lute offered five thousand testimonies from people healed, helped or saved by the Miraculous Child. He obtained twenty thousand, which Prevost took to Pope Francis in 2019. At the same time, Prevost relied on Lute’s popularity to evangelise and foster priestly vocations. As pope, he would bring a disciple of Lute, Edgard Rimaycuna, to the Holy See as his private secretary.’ The passage is doubly significant,” Infovaticana comments, “first, because it documents a relationship of close trust and collaboration between Prevost and Lute—‘Father Lute kept him informed of everything he did’, ‘Bishop Prevost was proud of his achievements’—in the years immediately preceding the victims’ complaints against the priest, submitted to Prevost himself in April 2022. Second, because it places within that orbit, as a disciple of the accused, the person who now shares the Pontiff’s daily life: his principal personal secretary.”
DOES THE POPE FORGIVE ONLY WHEN HE IS AFRAID?
The Peruvian journalist Pedro Salinas responded to this news. A friend and apologist of Prevost, he is grateful to him for having defended him against attacks by the Sodalitium when his articles exposed the wrongdoing of Figari and his associates. Salinas accuses Infovaticana of cowardice because it “always takes subtle shots at Pope Leo XIV, but never head-on; it always targets people in his entourage”. Then he dusts off an old stock argument, increasingly resembling an own goal: how can Prevost be accused of protecting a paedophile when, as a bishop, he so courageously went on the offensive against the powerful Sodalitium? Salinas says: “What are they suggesting? That Pope Robert Prevost did not investigate the case of some abusive little priest in Chiclayo, yet took action against the powerful Sodalitium? In other words, he was more afraid of Lute than of the Sodalitium?”
This bizarre way of reasoning rules out the possibility that the pope might be severe with one person and lenient with another, when Bergoglio’s record demonstrates a good pope’s capacity to protect his friends and strike savagely at his enemies, without a trace of Christian mercy.
More bizarre still is the idea that a churchman can be weak or lenient only out of fear. Well then, following the thread of an argument plainly constructed to keep Prevost’s enormous skeleton locked in the cupboard, should we imagine that Bergoglio protected the serial abuser Marko Rupnik in every possible way (something now established) because he was afraid of him? An interesting hypothesis hinted at by one of the world’s leading experts on sexual abuse by priests. An authoritative friend of Leo XIV.
