Is the Vatican’s justice system dysfunctional by design?

Despite years of legal reforms, a climate of dysfunction and special treatment surrounds cases of senior churchmen

Despite initially giving a different account, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne’s clarified this week that he did sign a written set of restrictions on his ministry over allegations of sexual abuse, after all.

While that concession is interesting, it doesn’t bring any real clarity to a complex case unfolding in the news this week, or explain why and how he continued in public ministry for years after his ministry was supposedly restricted.

And the cardinal’s admission to being handed a formal penal precept back in 2019 highlights again a pattern of sanctions being imposed on senior clerics without either resolving the cases against them, or effectively restricting their ministry.

A growing list of international scandals appears to highlight a continued climate of dysfunction and special treatment for senior churchmen while delivering little in the way of justice or resolution, either for the accused or for his alleged victims.

And, given the refusal of the Vatican to answer pressing and reasonable questions about how such cases have been dealt with, and why, many may now conclude that the dysfunction is intentional, despite Pope Francis’ legal reforms to the canonical process.

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Cardinal Cipriani, the former Archbishop of Lima, publicly confirmed last week that he is accused of sexual abuse dating back to the early 1980s, while maintaining his absolute innocence.

In a series of statements, the cardinal has said he has not been given details about the accusations.

Cipriani first denied, then confirmed receiving written restrictions on his ministry from the Vatican in 2019, though he maintains these were lifted verbally by Pope Francis in 2020 — which the Vatican has denied, while saying that some case by case exceptions were made “to accommodate requests related to the cardinal’s age and family circumstances.”

Cipriani’s case has thrown up numerous and obvious contradictions, which neither the cardinal’s statements, nor the Vatican’s appear to address fully.

While he now concedes that he was handed a written precept restricting his ministry in 2019, the cardinal maintains Pope Francis privately and verbally lifted its restrictions a few months later — which would come as a surprise, given that the two have some history of disagreement in South America.

The Vatican has said that, “specific permissions” notwithstanding, the restrictions were never lifted and remain in force.

In either event, since his retirement the cardinal has maintained a very public ministerial schedule in Spain, where he has lived since leaving office in Lima in 2019, leading retreats, celebrating Mass in the cathedral in Madrid, and engaging in what he himself called “extensive pastoral activity.”

Absent official clarification, which is unlikely to be forthcoming from the pope, it is impossible to know to what, if any, extent Francis lifted the restrictions on Cipriani, formally or informally.

But without making any assessment of the allegations against Cardinal Cipriani — and according to him he has not been afforded any opportunity to defend himself or even read the accusations he faces — it can reasonably be asked what is the point of imposing restrictions on a cardinal, in secret, and then either immediately lifting them or allowing him to live in open disregard of them?

Such a situation does not, in any way, serve as a preventative measure — which is the supposed legal function of a canonical precept. Nor does it serve to validate the accuser, in as much as it serves no public or practical function or stem from any legal finding of guilt.

Similarly, it does not vindicate the accused since, as Cardinal Cipriani has found, the accusations and restrictions can still find their way into the public forum.

But perhaps the most concerning — even infuriating for many Catholics — aspect of Cipriani’s case is that it cannot credibly be defended as either unforeseen or an example of the Vatican attempting to “learn as it goes” in a complicated situation.

On the contrary, it is in many respects all too familiar. It is hard for many to ignore the parallels with the McCarrick scandal of 2018, during which it emerged that the former Washington archbishop had been subject to a similar, privately issued penal precept from the Vatican which, like Cipriani, he appeared either free to disregard or had privately and informally lifted by the pope.

In between those two instances, there is a long list of comparable attempts at informal, private, or partial justice being applied to senior churchmen accused of the most serious crimes.

Also in 2019, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard retired as the Archbishop of Bordeaux, France only to admit in 2022 that he had sexually abused a 14-year-old girl 35 years earlier.

French prosecutors later closed a case against the cardinal due to the statute of limitations, but the Vatican took more than a year to open an investigation — even after the cardinal’s public admission — during which time he was reportedly barred from public ministry, though no formal declaration of this was ever made.

In the interim, he continued to serve as a member of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the curial department meant to be in charge of dealing with his admitted crime.

The cardinal finally resigned — he was not terminated — as a member of the DDF in 2023. Though he has since remained a cardinal legally in good standing and was eligible to vote in a conclave until he turned 80 in September last year.

Ricard’s public admission of guilt came shortly after it emerged that another of his French episcopal colleagues, Bishop Michel Santier, had resigned in 2021 following accusations of spiritual abuse, though he was allowed to publicly cite “health reasons” for stepping down.

And the news of Cardinal Cipriani’s case comes hot on the heels of the DDF prefect, Cardinal Fernandez, giving an update on the slow-rolling and probably most well known sexual abuse case of recent years, that of Fr. Marco Rupnik.

Rupnik is, of course, only currently facing a penal process at all because decades of allegations of the worst kind of blasphemous sexual abuse finally broke into the public domain, forcing Pope Francis to lift the statute of limitations in 2023.

But for many, the most galling aspect of Rupnik’s case isn’t the current slow progress, or even the public outcry which was needed to allow it to go forward. Rather it is the fact that he was actually tried for crimes of abuse by the DDF in 2019, in secret, and then excommunicated — equally secretly — while he was allowed to continue as a senior advisor to Vatican dicasteries and maintain a full, international slate of public events and appearances.

Many point back also to the case of Bishop Gustavo Oscar Zanchetta, who was accused of sexual abuse of seminarians and who was initially allowed to resign as Bishop of Oran for “health reasons” in 2017, with Pope Francis creating a special position for him in the Roman curia, naming him assessor at the Administration for the Patrimony of the Apostolic See and allowing him to live in the Domus Sanctae Marta, the Vatican hotel and retreat house where Pope Francis also lives.

Zanchetta, who was one of the first episcopal appointments made by the pope after his election in 2013, subsequently faced criminal charges in his native Argentina, returning to stand trial in 2022.

But despite measures taken by Pope Francis to declassify Church documents on cases of sexual abuse, including a 2020 Vatican policy requiring diocesan bishops to cooperate with judicial orders, the Vatican’s Zanchetta files were never released to the court and the judges elected to proceed with the trial without them.

After Zanchetta’s conviction, he was sentenced to four years in prison — but received no public sanction from the Church. Instead, Church authorities supported his release from prison on “medical grounds” and allowed him to live in a retired priests’ home.

Even more recently, the Vatican has refused to answer questions about why, and on whose authority, the pope’s chief of staff, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, attempted last year to overturn a canonical process laicizing another Argentine cleric convicted and laicized for the sexual abuse of minors.

Since the breaking of the McCarrick scandal in 2018, Pope Francis has made a series of public statements and supposedly landmark canonical reforms aimed at strengthening the Church’s canonical mechanisms for dealing with abuse — including and especially accusations concerning senior clerics.

However, at the same time, the practical track record of major cases has suggested that a climate of selective and secret justice remains at the highest levels of the Church.

After more than six years, the conclusion many have reached is that the law — including due process for alleged victims and accused alike — is only for those without influence.

If that narrative isn’t challenged it could end up being the central legacy of a pontificate which has pitched itself as a time of real reform.