Report: Zanchetta back in Argentina
The bishop has resumed serving his sentence for abusing seminarians under house arrest.
Disgraced Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta is back in his former Diocese of Orán, and will continue serving his four-year prison sentence under house arrest in a local convent, local Argentine media reported Thursday.
One of the bishop’s victims told local media this week that Zanchetta had met with Bishop Luis Scozzina of the local diocese and that Zanchetta would continue to serve his sentence under house arrest.
Zanchetta had previously been in Rome since November receiving “medical treatment.”
The bishop, who was convicted of aggravated sexual abuse of seminarians in 2022, arrived in Rome in November 2024, for cardiac treatment which his lawyers argued he could not receive in his home country, undergoing heart surgery at the Gemelli Hospital.
Under the terms of his permission to travel, issued by an Argentine court last year, Zanchetta was to return to Oran by April 1, where he had been serving his sentence under house arrest in a home for retired priests.
However, by the beginning of that month, the bishop’s whereabouts were unclear. The Gemelli Hospital confirmed at the time that Zanchetta had been discharged, but the Diocese of Nueva Orán would not comment or confirm if he had returned to Argentina.
However, Matías Montes, one of Zanchetta’s victims and a former seminarian in the Diocese of Nueva Orán, told local media on Thursday that Zanchetta was back in the country.
“Zanchetta is in Salta, he received the visit of the current Bishop of Orán, they’re preparing a room for him in the monastery, I saw it with my own eyes,” Montes said.
Montes added that Zanchetta was likely to ask for an early release under probation, allowed by the Argentinian criminal code.
“We know he’ll request it, the way is being paved for him… The judicial system did not do a good job. We have no confidence in them in Salta, while the Church is still close to the state, this will continue happening. We were totally abandoned. We wanted to be priests and we had to leave. There was no psychological help, no support, nor real justice.”
Zanchetta was convicted in March 2022 and sentenced to four and a half years in prison for “simple, continued sexual abuse aggravated by the role as a minister of worship.” However, following an appeal supported by local Church authorities, he was allowed to serve his sentence in a retired priests’ house and in November, he was allowed to travel to Rome to receive cardiac medical treatment.
The bishop was permitted to leave after his attorneys argued there “were no medical centers in Argentina that guaranteed the necessary conditions for the surgery, and that the procedure in Italy would be cheaper.”
Later, Argentine media reported that Zanchetta underwent heart surgery in the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, the same hospital where Pope Francis was hospitalized for almost two months earlier this year.
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In 2013, the newly-elected Pope Francis appointed Zanchetta the Bishop of Nueva Orán, one of the first episcopal nominations made by the pope.
But in 2017, Zanchetta resigned from that office at the age of 53 — 22 years before the normal age.
Zanchetta initially cited health reasons for his early retirement, but in January 2019, the Vatican announced that it had received complaints of sexual abuse against Zanchetta months earlier, in late 2018.
Also in January 2019, Zanchetta’s former vicar general in Nueva Orán, Fr. Juan José Manzano, told AP that the Vatican had been presented with allegations of sexual abuse of seminarians and financial misconduct by Zanchetta as early as 2015, and again in 2017, shortly before the bishop presented his resignation to Pope Francis.
Manzano said that as early as 2015, Church authorities were alerted that Zanchetta had sent sexually explicit “selfies” on his cell phone, and received “obscene” images of young men engaged in sexual contact.
According to Manzano, “the Holy Father summoned Zanchetta [to Rome] and he justified himself saying that his cellphone had been hacked, and that there were people who were out to damage the image of the pope.”
Shortly after Francis accepted his resignation in 2017, the pope created a new curial role for Zanchetta, naming him assessor at the Administration for the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, which functions as the Vatican’s sovereign wealth manager, and government reserve bank and paymaster. Zanchetta lived at the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican hotel and retreat house where Pope Francis also lived.
When the Vatican acknowledged allegations of sexual abuse against Zanchetta in 2019, it also announced the bishop was taking a “leave of absence” from his position at APSA.
Vatican officials also said that a canonical investigation was underway to examine the allegations against the bishop — to date, the conclusions of that investigation have not been announced and no canonical sanctions have been imposed on the bishop despite his civil conviction.
Zanchetta returned to work in the Vatican in early 2020, despite the then-ongoing criminal and canonical investigations into the allegations against him.
Zanchetta formally left his role at APSA in June 2021, leaving Vatican City ahead of his trial in Argentina, which began Feb. 21, 2022. Zanchetta was found guilty leading to charges of “aggravated continuous sexual abuse” against two seminarians, for which he was convicted in March 2022 to four and a half years in prison.
On February 4, an appeals’ court rejected Zanchetta’s attempt to overturn his conviction, in which the bishop argued his actions against the seminarian-victims had been subject to “gender stereotyping” because the bishop is homosexual.
Had the court not known of his homosexuality, Zanchetta’s lawyers argued, his actions would have been interpreted as innocent.
The court dismissed the appeal argument as “contrary to reality,” noting the bishop had groped the seminarians and repeatedly put his fingers in their mouths, and that “the sexuality of resting one's genitals on the bum [of another] is beyond any discussion.”
This is truly a disturbing and not so uncommon story. Priest with no self control, breaks the most sacred of trusts and then is gently slapped on the hand and told to just live quietly in peace all the while the damage that they inflicted festers and grows with no relief. The most egregious to me is to then blame his conviction on his homosexuality? Are you joking!
I hate when the claim to same-sex attraction is misused or exploited. It goes both ways: appealing to one's same-sex attraction as a cause for victimization in order to excuse crimes (as the bishop's lawyers do here) is egregious and unjust. It's as bad as when same-sex attraction is scapegoated and blamed as a blanket, as it so often is to try to explain curial bad behavior. It's unjust.
In the end, both of these misuses are deeply damaging to the actual majority of folks with same-sex attraction in the Church, who are doing their best to walk in the faith, with both successes and failures, just like everybody else.