The Church left the victims of pedophile Lute without a lawyer, after disqualifying him with opaque methods.

The so-called Lute case —abbreviation of the name of the priest Eleuterio Vásquez, pastor of the diocese of Chiclayo— remains one of the open wounds of the Church that must be resolved as soon as possible. Vásquez was reported for sexual abuse of minors whom he took to spend the night alone in a parish residence in the highlands. The complaints were presented directly to the then bishop of Chiclayo, Robert Francis Prevost, today Pope Leo XIV, but the file, far from being resolved, remains stalled and without any firm sanction against the pedophile. To this day, the victims have not even been able to access the case documents, despite repeatedly requesting them.

In contrast, the one who was punished in record time was the lawyer representing the victims since May 2024, the priest and canonist Ricardo Coronado Arrascue, whose disqualification has become one of the most anomalous and worrying episodes in recent canon law. His downfall began in July 2024, when the victims, assisted by Coronado, formally submitted a request to access the Lute case file, which had gone unanswered for years. A few weeks later, on August 24, 2024, the Peruvian Episcopal Conference (CEP) surprised by publishing an unprecedented statement: it announced that Coronado “could not receive approval to act as a canon lawyer” and prohibited his involvement in canonical cases.

The statement, issued after the 127th Plenary Assembly of the CEP, cited canon 1483 of the Code of Canon Law to justify the measure. But the truth is that episcopal conferences have no authority to disqualify lawyers. In practice, a body without judicial competence issued a public pronouncement against the lawyer for victims of abuse just when he was demanding transparency, which can only be understood as a maneuver aimed at discrediting and neutralizing his work.

According to the documentation to which InfoVaticana has had access, the file against Coronado was opened that same month of August, immediately after the episcopal statement. The process was carried out in an expedited manner, without clear notification of charges or defense guarantees. The accusations are, moreover, extremely fragile: some rumors without foundation from the United States about alleged visits to the priest’s home and the testimony of an adult person, identified by the initials M.V.T., who recounted a personal encounter with Coronado in Lima of an intimate nature although without full consummation, which Coronado denies as sexual, as well as obscene conversations on Facebook. The file itself admits the absence of concubinage, persistence, or public scandal. At most, it is a matter of private imprudence, entirely insufficient to justify any sanction. Currently, there is a defamation lawsuit by Coronado against M.V.T. in the Lima courts.

Although it is inconsistent to have been disqualified as a lawyer before being so as a priest, the most serious thing for the Peruvian priest came four months later. In December 2024, Coronado received notification of his dismissal from the clerical state by Papal Decree, but the document had a major irregularity: it did not bear the autograph signature of Pope Francis. The decree had been processed through diplomatic channels, with a Vatican seal, but without meeting the authenticity requirements that guarantee its validity. In practice, it was a dismissal disguised as a papal decree, lacking trial, sentence, or formal resolution.

This episode is also set in a particularly murky ecclesial context. At the end of 2024, with a physically and mentally weakened Francis, absurd and unsustainable decisions multiplied from the Curia, several linked to Peru. Among the most notorious, the penal precept against communicators Giuliana Caccia and Sebastián Blanco, which included a threat of excommunication for criticizing Peruvian prelates. The measure caused a global scandal and had to be revoked by Francis himself, who disauthorized those responsible after verifying that the decree had been issued without his knowledge. In that same climate of chaos and abuse of power, Coronado’s dismissal decree seems like another product of the same machinery: ecclesiastical officials using the Pope’s name to impose arbitrary sanctions, as if the Church had become their personal plaything.

Coronado’s file bears the signatures of the Bishop of Cajamarca, Isaac C. Martínez Chuquizana, and the then Secretary of the Dicastery for the Clergy, Mons. Andrés Gabriel Ferrada Moreira, responsible for processing and endorsing a measure without legal motivation or valid process. The sequence is telling: in July the victims request the documents; the documents are never transferred but in August an episcopal statement is issued against their lawyer and an expedited file is opened against him; without even resolving it with the right to defense and evidentiary proceedings, in December the “dismissal” arrives by irregular decree. Everything indicates that the sanction was fabricated as direct punishment for having requested access to the abuser’s file.

Meanwhile, Eleuterio Vásquez remains without sanction, protected by institutional silence and the inertia of a system that punishes the accuser before the accused. Coronado was expelled without trial and marked for life, and the victims were left without legal representation. By the way, no one in the Church bothered to offer them another canonist after liquidating their lawyer.

The pattern is undeniable: Rome was harsher on the victims’ lawyer than on the priest who abused minors. And it did so through a legally null act, issued in the name of a sick Pope and manipulating the mechanisms of ecclesiastical justice. The Lute case is no longer just a story of abuses, but a demonstration of how the hierarchy can turn canon law into an instrument of repression. Coronado’s disqualification is the proof: a fraudulent, cruel, and calculated maneuver, executed to obstruct justice and silence the victims.

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