Cardinal Cipriani denies abuse, confirms disciplinary measures
A prominent cardinal was secretly disciplined in 2019. He says Pope Francis later lifted the restrictions.
After Vatican restrictions emerged Saturday on a Peruvian cardinal’s ministry, the cardinal claimed they were lifted by Pope Francis, and that a 2018 allegation of sexual abuse against him was false.
But the Vatican said Sunday that that Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani remains subject to binding written restrictions on his ministry, with only a few exceptions given in limited circumstances.
The disagreement is likely to spur debate about the Vatican’s current and historical approach to sexual abuse allegations made against prominent bishops in the Church.
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Cipriani, the Archbishop of Lima from 1999 until 2019, said in a Jan. 25 statement that abuse allegations published the same day by Spain’s El País newspaper were “completely false.”
“I have never committed any crime, nor have I sexually abused anyone, neither in 1983, nor before, nor after,” wrote the 81-year-old cardinal.
Cipriani said the accusations against him were raised to the Vatican in 2018. The cardinal added that when he was informed of them in August 2018, he was not given any documents formally delineating the accusations against him, or given any indication whether he would face an investigation.
But the cardinal’s resignation was accepted in early 2019, and — he claimed — he was notified later that year of Vatican disciplinary measures against him.
“Without having been heard, without having known more, and without a process being opened, on Dec. 18, 2019, the apostolic nuncio verbally informed me that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had imposed a series of penalties on me, limiting my priestly ministry and requiring me to have a stable residence outside of Peru,” he wrote Satuday.
“I was also asked to remain silent, which I have done until now.”
But the cardinal also claimed that after a Feb. 4, 2020, private audience, Pope Francis permitted him to resume pastoral activities.
The audience was not recorded on the Vatican’s daily bulletin that day.
Despite the cardinal’s claims, a Vatican statement issued Sunday said that disciplinary measures against the cardinal remain in force, “although specific permissions have been granted on certain occasions to accommodate requests related to the cardinal’s age and family circumstances.”
A Vatican spokesman said that after Cipriani’s resignation as Lima archbishop in 2019, the cardinal “signed and accepted” disciplinary measures concerning his public activities, place of residence, and the use of episcopal insignia.
In his Jan. 25 statement, Cipriani said that his “extensive pastoral activity” in the years after his 2020 papal audience included “preaching spiritual retreats, administering sacraments, etc.”
He said: “During these years outside Lima, I lived in Rome dedicated to my work as a cardinal member of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints until I turned 80 and retired from all work in the Roman Curia and moved to Madrid.”
“It is serious that information is being published in an incomplete manner that seems to come from documentation reserved by the Holy See and that I do not even have in my possession. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that a cardinal has been falsely accused, with stories full of lurid details.”
There is considerable evidence of Ciprinia’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.
The cardinal’s statement comes at a time of ferment in the Catholic Church in Peru.
The Vatican is suppressing the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, an influential religious community founded in Lima in 1971, following investigations into accusations against its members.
Peru’s bishops expressed “solidarity with the victims of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae” at the end of a plenary meeting Jan. 25.
Cipriani was an early supporter of the community, but in 2016 he said it had “a clearly rotten leadership” and called for a sweeping reform of its formation process.
Cipriani is the first cardinal to belong to Opus Dei, the personal prelature founded in 1928 by Spanish priest St. Josemaría Escrivá.
Fr. Ángel Gómez-Hortigüela, Opus Dei’s vicar in Peru, said in a Jan. 25 statement that Cipriani engaged in pastoral work “with thousands of faithful, young and old,” from 1977 to 1988, when he was a priest incardinated in the personal prelature. Cipriani was named an auxiliary bishop of the Ayacucho o Huamanga archdiocese in 1988.
“In 2018, faced with the request for an interview with the complainant, I knew that I could not interfere in a formal accusation already initiated before the Holy See, which is the appropriate channel when a cardinal is involved,” Gómez-Hortigüela said.
“As I had no legal competence in the case, when a person in the complainant’s confidence asked me to meet him, I reacted by thinking that such a meeting might not be positive. Today, I realize that I could have offered him a personal, human, and spiritual welcome, which I know he received from other people in Opus Dei.”
“I would also like to make it clear that there is no record of any formal process during the years when Fr. Juan Luis Cipriani was incardinated in Opus Dei as a priest.”
Gómez-Hortigüela added: “With the version of the prelature’s protocols on abuse updated in 2020, it would be impossible today for an allegation to go unrecorded. At that time, there was not the same awareness as today about the most appropriate procedures for accompanying those involved.”
“Today, with the learning of everyone in the Church, any allegation has a clear itinerary and could not remain in the realm of private conversations, with people who are now deceased and with others who are not identifiable.”
In 2019, the year the Vatican imposed disciplinary measures on Cipriani, the former Washington archbishop Theodore McCarrick was dismissed from the clerical state in an accelerated administrative penal process conducted by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith after accusations against the McCarrick were made public the previous year.
Prior to that, McCarrick had been subject to a similar, privately issued penal precept from the Vatican which, like Cipriani, he appeared to either disregard or have lifted by the pope.
Also in 2019, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard retired as the Archbishop of Bordeaux, France. In 2022, Ricard admitted to abusing a 14-year-old girl 35 years earlier. French prosecutors closed a case against the cardinal a year later due to the statute of limitations.
The French Catholic newspaper La Croix reported in September 2023 that the Vatican had banned Ricard from public ministry for five years. Ricard turned 80 on Sept. 25, 2024, losing his right to vote in a conclave.
Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne was born in Lima on Dec. 28, 1943. He reportedly played in Peru’s national basketball team for six years in the 1960s. He joined Opus Dei in 1962 and was ordained as a priest of the personal prelature in 1977. He was named a bishop in 1988.
In 2001, two years after he was named Archbishop of Lima, Cipriani received the cardinal’s red hat at the same consistory where the future Pope Francis and Theodore McCarrick received theirs.
He was one of the negotiators who sought to end the 1996-1997 Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Lima.
Pope Francis appointed him as a member of the Vatican Council of the Economy in 2014, alongside Cardinal Ricard.
The pope accepted Cipriani’s resignation as Archbishop of Lima in January 2019, a month after his 75th birthday.
Lima’s mayor Rafael López Aliaga presented Cipriani with the city council’s highest honor Jan. 7. A citation said the cardinal received the award for his “tireless pastoral, academic, and ecclesiastical work.”
López Aliaga reiterated his support for Cipriani Jan. 26, in response to the El País article.
Concluding his Jan. 25 statement, Cipriani said: “I take this opportunity to express my total rejection of and revulsion at the sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable people, and I reiterate my commitment to the Church’s struggle to eradicate this scourge, following the indications of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and the special leadership of Pope Francis, putting the victims at the center.”
“Despite the pain that all this causes me, I do not hold a grudge against the accuser, I pray for him and for all the people who have suffered abuse by the Catholic clergy, but I reiterate my complete innocence.”
There needs to be full transparency about allegations of sexual abuse, the steps of due process for the accused, the findings of that process, and any punishment assigned. What is the point of imposing restrictions on ministry in secret? If the Vatican isn’t willing to enforce punishment or let competent authorities know that there are restrictions imposed, why bother with the whole process? Likewise, if in fact a pope can lift restrictions on ministry on a whim, why do we even have procedures?
I would be careful about this one: Cardinal Cipriani was Pope Francis' biggest archenemy in Latin America because he defended Catholic orthodoxy, while Bergoglio promoted heterodox views. In fact if there was a Latin American Cardinal who would have been a great pope, it would have been Cipriani.
When Cardinal Cipriani retired, Pope Francis purposely named as his successor in Lima a priest who had been banned from being professor at the Pontifical University of Lima by Cipriani for publishing and teaching heretical ideas. It was an obvious insult to Cipriani by Pope Francis telling him he would dismantle everything the Cardinal did so well in Peru.
This smells of personal vendetta from a Pope who has routinely let documented perverts like Father Rupnik off the hook.