There are questions that answer themselves, but it’s worth voicing them aloud:
What interest could El País have in protecting the image of a Pope?
It didn’t do so with Benedict XVI, whom it turned into the villain of every headline. Nor with Saint John Paul II, whom it still seeks shadows for where there is only light. But with Leo XIV—formerly Robert Prevost—the journalistic zeal transforms into pastoral tenderness. Suddenly, Prisa’s newspaper worries about cleaning his image, reinterpreting victims’ testimonies, and publishing headlines that sound more like episcopal communiqués than independent journalism.
The case borders on the grotesque. El País interviews an abuse victim of the priest “Lute” in Chiclayo for two hours, and then publishes a version that turns her criticisms of Bishop Prevost into a kind of praise. When the victim—Ana María Quispe—demands her right to rectification, the newspaper simply… doesn’t publish it. No apology, no clarification, no shame.
From the defense of the abused to the defense of the abuser
El País, the same one that for years presented itself as a standard-bearer against clerical abuses, now allows itself to manipulate a victim’s testimony to exonerate the superior who handled the case with “serious deficiencies,” according to the affected woman herself. In other words: it has gone from denouncing abuses to covering up the cover-ups. A full editorial turn worthy of study in journalism schools… or psychiatry.
Because, what moves a progressive media outlet to manipulate a pedophilia victim to save face for a Pope?
What kind of common agenda could unite El País and Robert Prevost, now Leo XIV, so that the victim stops being a victim and the institutional perpetrator becomes a martyr of an imaginary conspiracy?
Militant journalism in borrowed cassock
No one imagines El País rewriting the statements of Maciel’s victims to favor Sodano. Nor omitting a rectification that discredits him. And yet, it has done so with Prevost. A “progressive pope,” aligned with the ideological circles that the newspaper has communed with for decades. A Pope who fits its mold of a Church without dogma, without morals, and without a past.
That’s why it’s no surprise: El País is not defending the Pope, but its own projection of what a Pope should be. In the process, however, it tramples a woman who suffered abuses and who has to fight again so that her truth is not manipulated by the same ones who claim to speak “in the name of the victims.”
El País has gone from denouncing abusers to protecting the Pope from accusations of cover-up. And it has done so by sacrificing, once again, a victim.
What a embarrassment.