The controversial case affecting Leo XIV runs the risk of being closed falsely, without truth or reparation for the victims
The Lute Case
Ana María Quispe was 11 years old when the priest Eleuterio Vásquez González, alias “Lute,” tricked her into going to Cueva Blanca, an isolated village in the sierra of Ferreñafe, six hours from her family home in Chiclayo. During the night, Ana María suffered very serious sexual abuse at the hands of the diocesan priest. Along with Ana María, two more victims reported: one of them experienced the same situation in the same village just two months later, when she was 9 years old. The third victim experienced an episode of libidinous behavior in the parish house of La Victoria, in Chiclayo, by Lute when she was 13 years old.
Under the pretext of carrying out missionary activities, Lute persuaded the minors and their parents to accept the trip and overnight stay in the sierra. Once there, the girls discovered that there were no such missionary activities. The stay where Lute made them spend the night had only one bed of reduced dimensions. There the priest committed the sexual abuses, while another adult linked to the parish spent the night outside, sleeping in the vehicle they used to travel.
This terrible case was reported in April 2022 to the then Bishop Prevost, and its management has generated much controversy. The journalist Elise Allen mentions it extensively in the supervised and authorized interview-biography by Leo XIV, defending that the management of the process by Bishop Prevost would have been impeccable. The same conclusion has been reached by media outlets such as El País or Religión Digital, for whom questioning how the canonical process against the pedophile priest Lute was managed would be an ultraconservative conspiracy.
What no one denies is that, three years later, the Lute case has not been resolved. There is no sentence that determines the facts, sanctions the pedophile priest, and repairs the damage caused to the victims.
The Trap to Avoid Investigation and Trial
While the victims continue to wait for justice, the process has taken an unexpected and alarming turn. According to what Friar Giampiero Gambaro told the complainants in a meeting held two days after the death of Pope Francis, Lute has formally requested Rome to grant him the grace of dispensation from the clerical state—a kind of “voluntary resignation” that, if approved by Rome, would immediately end the ecclesiastical judicial process as far as Lute is concerned. Gambaro assured the victims that, given the context of sede vacante, the request would be accepted by the new Pope in a matter of months, almost inevitably. In other words: there would be no investigation, no sentence, no accountability. Just a file closed in silence.
The proposal was presented to the victims as a done deal, an administrative procedure against which there was no room for opposition. “There is no other way out,” they were told. This version, however, is misleading and legally unsustainable. Canon Law establishes that the loss of the clerical state is not an automatic right of the priest, but an exceptional grace that only the Pope can grant or deny according to the good of the Church. And, more importantly, Vatican praxis is clear: while a penal process is ongoing, the dispensation cannot be processed. Allowing it would amount to deactivating the trial by the simple will of the accused to the detriment of the victims.
This escape mechanism is not new. Recent cases, such as that of the American bishop Howard Hubbard, have shown that Rome can reject these requests when there are open cases. Granting the dispensation to Lute in the middle of a process stalled for years would be, according to consulted jurists, an act of institutional cover-up of enormous gravity: it would erase any possibility of a sentence, deprive the victims of justice, and send a devastating message about the Church’s tolerance of sexual abuses committed by its clergy.