VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican said Sunday that disciplinary sanctions are still in effect against the first-ever cardinal from Opus Dei following accusations of sexual abuse, confirming a series of restrictions against the once-powerful archbishop of Lima, Peru that included requiring him to leave his home country.
The sanctions imposed on Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne include restrictions “relating to his public activity, place of residence and use of insignia,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said. While on specific occasions he was allowed to deviate from them due to his age and family needs, the measures remain in effect, he said.
The 81-year-old Cipriani, who lives in Madrid and Rome, acknowledged the sanctions on Saturday following a report in Spain’s El País newspaper detailing one alleged victim’s story. Cipriani called the allegations “completely false.”
“I haven’t committed any crime, nor have I sexually abused anyone in 1983, neither before nor after,” Cipriani said in the letter provided by Opus Dei’s Rome office.
Bruni's statement didn't provide details of the case, but he said the sanctions were imposed after Cipriani retired as head of the Peruvian church in 2019 “as a result of allegations against him,” suggesting more than one claim. He said Cipriani accepted the measures.
The sanctions are similar to those imposed on other high-ranking churchmen who have been accused of sexual abuse. The former archbishop of Agana, Guam, Archbishop Anthony Apuron and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former bishop of East Timor, Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, were both forced to leave their home countries and limit their public ministries following allegations of abuse.
Cipriani, who led the Peruvian church for two decades before his retirement in 2019, was the first cardinal of Opus Dei, the conservative movement that was founded by the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá in 1928 and has more than 90,000 members in 70 countries. The lay group, which was greatly favored by St. John Paul II, counts priests, celibate laypeople as well as laymen and women with secular jobs and families who strive to “sanctify ordinary life.”
The allegations against Cipriani add to the upheaval in the Peruvian church following confirmation last week that Pope Francis had decided to dissolve the powerful and influential Peruvian-based movement Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, another conservative lay Catholic movement. After years of attempts at reform, Francis decided to suppress the group after a Vatican investigation uncovered sexual abuse by its founder, financial mismanagement by its leaders and spiritual and physical abuse by its top members.
Cipriani was newly in charge of the Peruvian church when the first allegations against Sodalitium aired publicly in a series of articles in 2000 in the magazine Gente by former member José Enrique Escardó.
Cipriani was archbishop when the first victims presented formal accusations against Sodalitium in 2011 to the church. He insisted that he handled the allegations properly, but it wasn’t until journalists Pedro Salinas and Paola Ugaz exposed the practices of Sodalitium in their 2015 book “Half Monks, Half Soldiers” that the case began to move.
Ten years later and 25 years after Escardó first went public with stories of abuse, Escardó met with the pope on Friday. He said they discussed the dissolution of the movement and the need to keep victims front and center as the Vatican dismantles the group and tends to its members.
“I feel very, very good, listened to,” he told The Associated Press on Saturday just outside St. Peter’s Square. “I think I also let go of a heavy weight, which is the voice of so many victims.”
He attributed the church’s slow response to the Sodalitium scandal, and the attacks that victims endured for speaking out, to the protection Sodalitium enjoyed at the highest echelons of the church in Rome and Lima.
“Cardinal Cipriani was the Opus Dei cardinal that Sodalitium needed,” he said.
The Sodalitium was founded in 1971 as one of several Catholic societies born as a conservative reaction to the left-leaning liberation theology movement that swept through Latin America in the 1960s. At its height, the group counted about 20,000 members across South America and the United States. It was enormously influential in Peru and has its U.S. base in Denver.
After a Vatican investigation, Francis last year began taking action, first by formally expelling the Sodalitium’s founder and 10 top members. Last week the group confirmed the Vatican planned to suppress it.
Peruvian bishops, for their part, expressed solidarity with Sodalitium’s victims and thanked them in a statement Saturday, but defended their actions.
“We deeply regret that something so terrible has happened in the church in Peru,” the bishops conference said in a statement Saturday. “We express our regret to those who have not felt duly accompanied by us because they did not know about the steps that this Episcopal Conference has been taking before the Holy See for several years.”
Victims have long accused the Peruvian church hierarchy of complicity in the Sodalitium scandal and of looking the other way, given the group’s influence in the country.
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Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press
