We reproduce, for informational interest in the Lute case, the analysis by the Italian journalists Giorgio Meletti and Federica Tourn. In the face of the striking silence of much of the media on this case, which did find an echo to spread a version full of gaps, deeper analyses open up on the situation:
In the book LEON XIV – Citizen of the World, Missionary of the 21st Century, a more than authorized biography written by Elise Ann Allen, Vatican expert and friend of Robert Prevost, published for mysterious reasons only in Spanish and appearing in coincidence with the pope’s seventieth birthday on September 14, at a certain point there is a literally unbelievable page.
Prevost tells Allen about his last meeting with Pope Francis, and it’s enough to rub one’s eyes and reread it ten times to convince oneself that he really said it.
An Incredible Meeting
Let’s first look at the context. On March 24, Jorge Mario Bergoglio returned to Santa Marta after the long hospitalization at the Gemelli, to die in his bed. For months already, talk of a conclave has been circulating, and precisely the next day, March 25, the Snap network writes to Secretary of State Pietro Parolin and to the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Víctor Fernández, to report the alleged misdeeds of Cardinal Prevost, prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, engaged in covering up pedophiles.
These accusations have been discussed in the Catholic world and in the media for months. The attacks on Prevost are directly connected to the march toward the conclave, for which the American cardinal is considered in pole position, although the Italian candidates and their reference journalists pretend not to notice.
Immediately after the attack signed by Snap, Pope Francis summons Prevost. Here is the account given by the protagonist to Elise Ann Allen:
«I received a phone call asking me to go secretly to Santa Marta, and they told me: “Don’t tell anyone.” The pope wanted to see me. And they didn’t tell me anything else. So I didn’t tell anyone in the office, not the secretary, no one. I just disappeared and went. I went up the service stairs, and no one saw me.
Then, after he told me what he wanted, regarding work, bishops, and other issues he had in mind, I said: “For your information, Holy Father, I thought that perhaps the reason you had called me this way was because you wanted my resignation.” We laughed together.
When he was irritated with someone, he said it clearly, and since they had told me to go and I knew he still wasn’t receiving many people, I thought: “Oh, what could have happened now?” But obviously he didn’t ask for my resignation».
With apparent carelessness, the pope leaves the info-sphere an embarrassing testimony for the entire Church. Why did he have to fear that the pope, on his deathbed, would call him to dismiss him? There are two possible answers, and both are embarrassing.
The first is that Francisco’s successor most officially endorses the image of Bergoglio that has accompanied him in recent years within the Curia: a psychically unstable, vengeful, and capricious man, capable of torpedoing bishops and cardinals without a clear motive.
What he did on September 24, 2020, with Cardinal Angelo Becciu, until a few months earlier his closest collaborator as substitute of the Secretariat of State and, de facto, number three in the Catholic hierarchy.
The second is that Prevost feared that Francis would present him with the bill for the Quispe case, the same one that has raised Snap: in Peru, three sisters abused as girls by a priest, whom they accuse of having been covered up by Prevost when he was bishop of Chiclayo.
He really feared it, as he lets us understand in the lines immediately following in the book, dedicated to what is defined as a delegitimization campaign mounted precisely on the Quispe case. But how did it occur to the pope to make such a private and, precisely, embarrassing thought known to the world?
Something doesn’t add up.
The septuagenarian Robert Francis Prevost, from the day he was elected pope et sibi imposuit the name Leo XIV, has wanted to present himself as a calm man, meek but firm, a Montalbanian “a man who goes securely, friend of others and of himself, and who does not worry about his shadow”.
And while the entire world press, servile as the spirit of the times demands, with lyrical tones assures his self-portrait every day, the man from Chicago does nothing but sow clues of the opposite sign: as if he desperately wanted to inform us that he lives in fear, and that his shadow anguishes him.
What keeps him awake at night, apparently, is precisely this story of sexual abuses committed by a Peruvian priest about twenty years ago; a story in a certain sense minor—said with all respect for the victims—if compared to the thousands of true everyday horrors with which priests on the five continents systematically endanger the very existence of the Catholic Church. But there’s nothing to be done.
For two years now, that is, long before becoming pope, Prevost has been obsessed with the suspicion of having covered up the pedophile Eleuterio Vásquez González, known as Father Lute, despite the almost unanimous chorus of priests, bishops, Vatican experts, and friendly journalists who consider those accusations false and manipulated, woven by a former Augustinian in conflict with Prevost for about 30 years.
As soon as Prevost was elected on May 8, 2025, the skeleton came out of the closets of the most traditionalist Catholic sites without any political motive being seen, since with the pope from Chicago the Church’s pendulum swings back toward tradition; just think of the Latin Mass celebrated in St. Peter’s by the super-traditionalist Cardinal Raymond Burke on Saturday, October 25.
In fact, these sites limited themselves to reprising a news item given by abuse victim organizations, first and foremost Snap (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests). In short, what takes the sleep away from Prevost is not the politically oriented attacks but the facts: a past that he doesn’t want to pass, at least in his mind.
And so, the authorized biography written by his friend Elise Ann Allen dedicates an inordinate space to the dramatic story of the three Peruvian sisters—Ana María, Aura Teresa, and Juana Mercedes Quispe Díaz—all of them abused by Father Lute when they were girls (between 9 and 13 years old) and who only many years later found the strength to report the facts to their bishop who, in 2020—when the torment begins—was precisely the bishop of Chiclayo, Robert Prevost.
For 25 pages, Allen accompanies a passionate entirely exculpatory defense of Prevost, who allows himself to be quoted extensive fragments of his own point of view. However, she must also give the floor to Ana María, the most determined of the Quispe sisters.
She confirms the accusations in a very incisive way. She states, essentially, that when she and her sisters went to talk to Prevost he was very kind and understanding, but he did not report Father Lute to the prosecutor’s office (as he should have done in obedience to the motu proprio Vos estis lux mundi, promulgated by Francis on May 9, 2019), and he only formally opened the so-called “preliminary investigation,” without doing any real investigation and without taking written statements from the victims’ testimony.
Allen writes, concluding those 25 meticulous pages: «Contrary to what other testimonies cited in this book claim, Ana María maintains that, although the diocese [i.e., Prevost, ndr] opened the case, it did not conduct an investigation, under the pretext that “in the Church there is no way to investigate”.
However, as the Vatican has confirmed, there is indeed a file in Rome, which would prove that an investigation was carried out.
Quispe insists that in said dossier there is only “one sheet,” which would mean, according to her, that there was no adequate investigation, and she accuses the diocese of having used the file from her civil case to close it also in Rome».
In summary, Allen cannot brand Quispe as a liar and leaves the reader with the doubt of whether Prevost really has reasons to not sleep at night.
Even more so because the Vatican confirmation of the existence of the file with the preliminary investigation is only an anonymous off the record: Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, as we will see, has never said nor allowed a word to be said in defense of the then prefect Prevost.
From there arises Allen’s verdict, which remains between the uncertain and the ambiguous: «In the end, what is clear is that it is not a case of abuse like so many others, but one in which a genuine effort to help the victims clashed with many particular, personal, and institutional interests, with the election of Pope Leo XIV and, in the midst of all that, three women were left disoriented, feeling used».
But here the issue is not to determine whether they elected a pope who is a protector of pedophiles, a theme that, in reality, no one has raised in these terms, also because, as the robed Vatican experts would say (to avoid taking sides, just in case), every pontiff has his lights and shadows.
The theme that jumps out is Prevost’s anguish, which Allen’s book reflects with such clarity that it makes us wonder why the pontiff decided to get himself into trouble on his own.
The Second Slip
In the authorized biography written by Elise Ann Allen there is a second slip by the pope. The author, who claims her friendship with Robert Prevost, recounts a meeting with the cardinal shortly before Pope Francis died: «When we met in his office, I remember telling him that he was being talked about as papabile if things went badly for Francis, and I asked him if that bothered him. He firmly replied no, that he was not at all nervous, because “they would never elect an American”».
Two months after the conclave, interviewed by Allen for the book, Prevost lets slip, without apparent reason, another element that made him skeptical about his chances of becoming pope, besides the “they would never elect an American.” To the question of whether there was even a part of him that thought about the election, Leo XIV responds:
«Honestly, no. I mean, I tried not to think about it, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep. But the night before entering the conclave, I managed to sleep because I told myself: “They would never elect an American as pope.” It was like leaning on that thought, a kind of “Relax. Don’t let it go to your head.”
Because, obviously, during the congregation, in the meetings prior to the conclave, I had heard a couple of things. There were some rumors.
But I also thought about the case you asked me about earlier [the one about the complaints in Chiclayo, sic], which worried some of the other cardinals, if this issue of sexual abuses could be a problem, and other reasons, experience, little time as a bishop, as a cardinal.
And that’s when I thought of the old and famous adage that people simply said: “There won’t be an American pope”.
Who knows why Prevost feels the need to communicate such intimate and explosive thoughts to the world. The same Allen has recounted, a few pages earlier, that in 2023 Ana María Quispe began to publicly accuse Prevost of having covered up the pedophile Eleuterio Vásquez Gonzáles, known as Father Lute, and that the news was boosted by a series of Catholic sites hostile to Prevost, among which she cites the Spanish infovaticana.com and the Italian Nuova Bussola Quotidiana (lanuovabq.it).
Allen leaves no room for doubt: this occurs «while Francis’s health began to decline and a conclave seemed imminent».
Almost all the international press considers the accusations against Prevost false and instrumental, even after they were relaunched the day after his election as pope. However, Prevost confesses to the entire world that, once the conclave began, he was concerned that «this issue of sexual abuses could be a problem» for his election as pope.
Which, brutally, can mean two things: either that Prevost himself considered the Father Lute matter a skeleton in his closet, or that the future pope feared that inside the conclave the accusations (supposedly false) of covering up a pedophile could be used in bad faith by cardinals hostile to his election. To the face of the Holy Spirit…
To Prevost’s fear—thus confessed with such candor—of losing the papal election because of Father Lute’s sexual abuses, can probably be attributed another of the many singular episodes of this story.
It was reported by the Spanish newspaper El País on October 1, 2025, in a long article apparently intended to relaunch the thesis already sustained by the newspaper itself immediately after the election of Leo XIV.
The article claims that Ana María Quispe, in an interview, admits that she and her sisters were manipulated by the lawyer Ricardo Coronado, an Augustinian priest in very bad relations with Prevost for about 30 years, who would have used them for a smear campaign against a papabile cardinal.
But Quispe reacted to the article with a harsh denial and a threat of legal action, reiterating an obvious fact: the instrumental use that Coronado made of her accusations against Prevost does not mean that those accusations are false.
But the El País article, which seems oriented to definitively dismantle the accusations against Prevost, also contains a disconcerting revelation: on April 23, just 48 hours before the death of Pope Bergoglio, the bishop of Chiclayo, Edinson Edgardo Farfán, receives the Quispe sisters to find a “definitive” solution to their sad case. Here is the account from El País:
Quispe recounts that in January of this year she met with the new bishop of Chiclayo, Edinson Edgardo Farfán, appointed in 2024. «And he told me: “What do you want us to do?” And I replied: “You have a pedophile there! How do I have to tell you? Rather tell me what you think you’re going to do with that pedophile you have there”».
According to Quispe, Farfán invited her to report the case to the Church again and assured her that, this time, it would be different. The meeting took place on April 23, but when the victims arrived, they were informed that Father Eleuterio had asked to leave the priesthood.
Consequently, they were told that there was nothing more to do, since he would no longer be part of the clergy. «We asked if that was the end of everything, and they told us that was the maximum penalty,» Quispe recalls.
On one hand, then, there is a Prevost worried that the Quispe case could be used against him to thwart him in the race to the papacy, but also fearful that the dying Pope Francis would ask him to resign because of it.
On the other hand, there is Farfán, appointed in 2024 by Prevost in his new role as prefect of bishops, but also an Augustinian and his disciple and friend, who, as soon as Bergoglio dies and the papabili set off like the horses of the Palio di Siena, “to the ropes” for the start of the conclave, summons the three Quispe women to tell them that the case is closed.
The abuser leaves the Church and therefore can no longer be prosecuted, also because, in any case, the harshest sanction—reduction to the lay state—he imposed on himself. But the cruelest sanction is imposed by Bishop Farfán, disciple and friend of Prevost, on the poor Ana María Quispe, when he tells her that Father Lute has admitted the facts, emphasizing that he does not consider them crimes.
Quispe declares to El País: «He has confessed, but he says he doesn’t consider it a crime. I don’t think abusing a girl is normal for them, but it’s just a sin, nothing more».
The Sodalicio Boomerang
Prevost and his journalist friend must have been pressed by the rush to publish the authorized biography coinciding with the pope’s seventieth birthday.
The interview that forms its backbone was recorded on July 10, 2025, just two months before the book’s publication. And it seems there was no time to verify with due attention some inconsistencies.
As we have seen, from certain hesitant words by Prevost published in Citizen of the World emerges an inexplicable and uncontrolled concern for the story of the three Quispe sisters who today accuse precisely the pope of having covered up their aggressor when he was bishop of Chiclayo.
The pope wants to address the issue to clear the clouds looming over his recent election, but he seems to do so without the necessary lucidity and with disastrous results.
On page 264, Prevost states that on April 5, 2022, when the three Quispe sisters went to him to report the violence suffered by Father Lute, he believed their truth and guaranteed them all kinds of attention, solidarity, and support. Then, adding ad abundantiam (as they say in the Vatican) one more argument to the many already evoked in favor of his rectitude, he launches the boomerang:
«Unfortunately, justice in the Church, as well as justice in Peru and in many other places, takes a lot of time. These processes are very slow. This particular case became more complicated because not long after they presented the accusations, I was transferred from the diocese [of Chiclayo, ndr]».
This phrase, as we will see, is problematic for several reasons. However, the intended meaning by Prevost is clear: he wants to let the world know that, after April 13, 2023, when he left for Rome having been appointed by Pope Francis as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, he could no longer deal with the case, and that this contributed to things not being satisfactory for the three abuse victims to whom he had guaranteed all kinds of support.
But on this point the account is not precise. After the white smoke on May 8, media around the world have treated the Quispe case in every minimal detail, both to accuse Prevost and to defend him from the accusations, so one would expect the pope and his biographer to pay the same level of attention to details.
According to Allen, after the three Quispe sisters went to Prevost to report Father Lute on April 5, 2022, the following happens (p. 248):
«The priest Vásquez Gonzáles denied any abuse, claiming that the situation was a misunderstanding. However, Bishop Prevost opened a preliminary investigation and imposed restrictions, prohibiting him from public ministry and, consequently, from exercising as a parish priest and hearing confessions, although he could continue celebrating Mass privately.
In July 2022, the results of the preliminary investigation were sent to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Two months later, in September 2022, the latter contacted Prevost to ask him to deepen the investigation further and provide more information.
Seven months later, on April 3, 2023, the civil prosecutor archived the case due to prescription, as had been foreseen, and on April 12 Prevost was appointed prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, and began preparations to move to Rome.
On October 8 of the same year, after Monsignor Prevost had already left the diocese, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith archived the case against Vásquez Gonzáles pro nunc, that is, “for now,” due to lack of evidence: the accusations were difficult to prove and no other complaints had been presented, neither before nor after, by the Quispe Díaz sisters».
Attention to details. On September 10, 2024, the diocese of Chiclayo issues a long statement to reject the accusations against Prevost launched two days earlier by Ana María Quispe through the hugely popular Peruvian TV program Cuarto Poder.
According to the diocese—led by a disciple and friend of Prevost—the situation of Father Lute had been archived by the Peruvian judiciary due to prescription «in the first quarter of 2023,» and on April 3, unlike what Allen wrote, it was Prevost, still bishop of Chiclayo for ten more days, who sent the prescription sentence to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith «as additional documentation».
A malicious observer might point out that the prescription in the civil sphere for facts so distant in time is as obvious as it is irrelevant to the ecclesiastical process, which explicitly excludes it for abuses against minors. Prevost, so prodigal in considerations and details about the Quispe case, could have explained to his biographer his zeal in informing the Vatican Curia that Father Lute had escaped unpunished from Peruvian justice.
To which, moreover, the pedophile Vásquez Gonzáles had been reported by the victims, while Prevost had abstained from doing so, contrary to what is indicated in Pope Francis’s motu proprio Vos Estis Lux Mundi.
But let’s stick to the essential point. Prevost insists a lot on making it known that if the Quispe case had an unsatisfactory evolution, it is due to his transfer to Rome; that is, to the fact that he could no longer deal with the matter.
This argument would sound offensive to his successors in Chiclayo if it were not clearly false. In reality, Prevost did not want to deal with the matter anymore: if he had wanted to, he could have, and the proof is offered to us by the pope himself, in another moment of carelessness, on page 208 of his authorized biography.
First, however, it is necessary to understand the context in which Leo XIV scores this own goal. Alongside the Quispe case, in recent years in Peru the story of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae has developed, a powerful society of apostolic life founded by the theologian Luis Fernando Figari and blessed by John Paul II.
According to the tradition of these Catholic structures with a charismatic leader, in the Sodalicio too the main activity seemed to have been the psychological, physical, and sexual abuse of minors.
To the point that it was Francis, in August 2024, who expelled Figari from the Sodalicio and then dissolved the institute in January 2025. In the battle against Figari and the Sodalicio, Prevost is on the front line.
Thus, when Ana María Quispe accuses the former bishop of Chiclayo of having covered up Father Lute, the chorus in defense of the pope claims that his inflexibility with the Sodalicio demonstrates the unfounded accusation of silent connivance with Father Lute.
Even more so, say Prevost’s friends, that after the harsh sanction against Figari it is precisely the friends of the Association who amplify Quispe’s accusations.
While Pedro Salinas and Paola Ugaz, two Peruvian journalists who in 2015, with their successful investigative book Mitad monjes, mitad soldados, were the driving force behind the investigation into Figari and the Sodalicio, defend the pope tooth and nail. And that today they report that, attacked by the powerful Sodalicio, for ten years they could count on the friendship and support of Robert Prevost.
And here is where the boomerang begins. Although inflexibility with the Sodalicio in itself does not dismantle Ana María Quispe’s accusations—in the history of pedophile priests, “two weights and two measures” is the norm—on page 208 Allen focuses precisely on the theme of Prevost’s involvement in the Sodalicio case:
«… Regarding a meeting he had with then-Cardinal Prevost during a visit to Rome in October 2024 (…) Salinas recounted that the current pope had kept abreast of the matter. Thus, in a follow-up email on October 16, 2024, Prevost insisted, according to Salinas, on the need for justice: “We must continue working to reach a just conclusion to this process.”
Salinas recounts that the current pontiff wrote to him thanking him for his work and commitment: “Thank you. Good trip. I hope we can soon put an end to this story. [Now] we continue working to help the Special Mission of Scicluna and Bertomeu,” Prevost wrote.
In the end, the Special Mission, despite strong pressure and attempts to discredit its work, concluded with the suppression of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae and the other three communities founded by Figari».
In summary, on page 262, the Pope says that, having left the diocese of Chiclayo, he could no longer deal with the three Quispe sisters and the priest who had abused them when they were girls, despite always having believed their accusations.
On page 206, the journalist Salinas acknowledges that in Rome he continued to deal with the investigation into the Sodalicio, which formally did not concern him, from a distance of ten thousand kilometers: he “had kept up to date” and proposed “to work to help the Special Mission of Scicluna and Bertomeu,” the two Doctrine of the Faith investigators sent by Bergoglio to settle accounts with the abuser Figari.
Thus, also for Leo XIV, just like for his predecessor, there are abusers to turn a blind eye to and abusers to pursue relentlessly. The surprising thing is that it is he himself who communicates it to us, without considering an embarrassing coincidence: in the same days of his email to Salinas, Ana María Quispe, in a peak of desperation, writes to Pope Francis a long letter, a harsh accusation that culminates in this phrase:
«The diocese of Chiclayo, where Monsignor Robert Prevost Martínez, then Monsignor Guillermo Cornejo Monzón, and currently Monsignor Edison Farfán Córdova have served as bishops, in separate and lacking-truth statements, has assumed a tenacious defense in favor of the priest accused of abuses against minors».
But Prevost was already far away.
The Role of Parolin, the Arch-Enemy
Among the many surprising revelations that Prevost decided to include in his authorized biography, the one that seems premeditated by nature, and not the fruit of a distraction, refers to the existence of a hostile lobby that tried to discredit him before the conclave that elected him pope; that, evidently, is headed by Secretary of State Pietro Parolin; and that has used as a weapon to discredit him precisely the case of the three Quispe sisters who, in April 2022, in the diocese of Chiclayo, Peru, reported to the then bishop Prevost having suffered sexual abuses when they were between 9 and 13 years old by the popular priest Eleuterio Vásquez Gonzáles, known as Father Lute.
Prevost would have covered up the pedophile priest, according to Ana María Quispe’s accusations, and today he seems so obsessed with this story that he drops continuous signals of anguish, like the breadcrumbs that Little Thumb left after his parents’ betrayal.
And, in fact, it seems that in the life of the Church Prevost’s brothers are no less ruthless than Tom Thumb’s father and mother: only he is not the cunning child from Perrault’s tale, but the pope, the absolute boss of the cynical brothers.
Let’s recap. Through Elise Ann Allen’s authorized biography of Prevost, we know three things: a) that one day Pope Francis called him and he feared he would ask him to resign, perhaps because of the suspicions that accompanied him in the Quispe case; b) that, once the conclave began, when he heard himself talked about as a strong papabile, he feared that his brothers would make him pay for the accusation of having covered up a pedophile; c) that, effectively, after leaving Chiclayo (April 13, 2023) to go to Rome, where he became prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, he no longer dealt with “Father Lute” (who in the end got away with it), but closely followed and supported the Vatican investigation into the Sodalitium.
What treatment is reserved for Parolin in Allen’s book LEON XIV – Citizen of the World, Missionary of the 21st Century?
Parolin is mentioned only four times. The first, on page 224, to say that on the eve of the conclave he and the Filipino cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle were more accredited than Prevost as papabili; the other three in a few lines on page 266, in the account of the four ballots of the conclave that quickly saw the ambitions of the Secretary of State sink before the growing consensus on Prevost’s name.
Parolin was and remains pro nunc, as they say in the Curia, Secretary of State, that is, number two in the Catholic hierarchy. But Prevost’s authorized biography erases him. If one reads the facts carefully, one understands the reason.
On October 1, 2025, El País published the long article we have already talked about to claim that the three Quispe sisters would have admitted to having been used by the former Augustinian Ricardo Coronado, hired by them as a lawyer, for a smear campaign against Prevost presented as retaliation for his commitment against Luis Fernando Figari’s Sodalitium.
The El País article is signed by Paola Nagovitch and Íñigo Domínguez. Nagovitch recorded a two-hour interview with Ana María Quispe, who, precisely using the recording as proof, categorically denied El País in a letter.
This point is not very solid for Leo XIV and, moreover, the El País article comes out two weeks after Prevost’s biography which, as we have seen, more or less clumsily relaunches the Quispe case with its trail of poison.
Even the authorized biographer Allen, on April 2, 2025, while Bergoglio is still alive and Prevost, as he has let us know, fears that the Quispe case will harm him in the race for the papacy, writes an article intended to prove that the accusations against Prevost launched on March 25 by the survivors’ network Snap are being spread by Coronado. The latter, meanwhile, was first disqualified from practicing law in ecclesiastical courts and then even expelled from the priesthood by Bergoglio on charges of serious sexual abuse crimes, with violation of the sixth commandment and sections 1 and 3 of canon 1395, to be precise. Thus, the Quispe sisters were also left without a lawyer.
More recently, Coronado has denounced that in the process (according to him manipulated) that expelled him from the Church, Prevost played a decisive role. Allen also reports Snap’s position, which seems logical: «Regarding Coronado’s reduction to the lay state and the claim that there would be personal resentment toward Prevost, Snap has stated: “What matters are the underlying facts of the case, and the canonist’s motivations are irrelevant”».
And here, when Prevost is not yet pope, Allen introduces us to the meanders of Vatican power struggles. She writes that in 2024, when accusations against Prevost begin to circulate in Peru, an unidentified Vatican official tells her (confidentially) that the matter was examined and it was verified that Prevost had not covered up the pedophile Father Lute, but acted according to the norms. And that at the end of March 2025, when Snap relaunches its accusations ahead of the imminent conclave, it was Prevost’s own secretariat in Rome (perhaps Prevost himself, given the friendship and the account of a private meeting between them in those same days) that rejected the accusations.
At the most critical point, Prevost’s “secretariat” shows clumsiness: «As for the claim that Prevost did not contact civil authorities, Prevost’s office stated that he spoke with the diocesan lawyer after the women came forward, and that he was informed that the case would not be subject to civil investigation “due to prescription.”» Clumsy, but also very weak.
On one hand, it is claimed that the accusations are invented by a former Augustinian who hates him; on the other, the only argument that the former bishop of Chiclayo can bring in his defense is that he did not report to the judiciary (which as a bishop he had at least the moral obligation to do) because the diocese’s lawyer told him it was useless, that everything was prescribed.
A lawyerly argument that is at the antipodes of the “being on the side of the victims” with which the Catholic Church washes its mouth every day to disguise its hermetic and generalized law of silence.
Prevost is Left Alone by His Rival
But such a clumsy defense may have an explanation. Prevost feels in danger, he has understood that the real attack comes from inside the Vatican. And from that moment, even after his election as pope, he begins to circulate encrypted clues to signal to whoever wants to understand that it was Secretary of State Pietro Parolin who was behind the campaign intended to neutralize one of the most dangerous competitors (the strongest, in retrospect) in the race for Francis’s succession.
Paola Nagovitch and Íñigo Domínguez, the two El País journalists who on October 1, 2025, sign the controversial (and denied) interview with Ana María Quispe, are undoubtedly on Prevost’s side. On June 12, 2025, about a month after Leo XIV’s election, they write in his defense a long article that, already from the title, does not beat around the bush: «A campaign that was also fueled inside the Vatican.»
The allusion is clear. After recalling that the accusations against Prevost come from the friends of the Congregation and that the expelled priest Coronado is a sinner without remission, etcetera, etcetera, comes the novelty: «The future pope was also the object of an internal campaign in the Vatican, where he was already considered one of the favorites for the conclave that had to elect Francis’s successor.»
Next, they quote an anonymous «Latin American ecclesiastical source close to the pontiff» who states: «Father Robert has suffered a lot in the last year because no one in the Vatican has come to his defense. He has felt abandoned.»
These phrases seem to have been spoken by Prevost. In any case, they are very explicit statements and quotes that have not been denied, qualified, or specified by any of the parties. The most authoritative international press on the matter speaks of the nest of vipers in the Vatican and how the entire Curia pretends not to notice.
In the El País article, it is the same anonymous source that insists: the public accusations against Prevost for having covered up the pedophile priest Eleuterio Vásquez Gonzáles, known as Father Lute, begin in the spring of 2024, a year before the conclave, when it is already known that Bergoglio is reaching the end of his term.
The prefect of bishops is legitimately worried about his reputation and his papal ambitions, both in danger. Nagovitch and Domínguez, explaining that for Prevost the twelve months preceding his election as pope were a true ordeal («ordeal»), write:
«The cardinal expected the Holy See to intervene in his defense, according to a Latin American ecclesiastical source close to the Pope. However, in a year marked by controversies, up to his appointment as the new pontiff, the only responses to the accusations against Prevost came from the diocese of Chiclayo.
“Prevost suffered a lot during that period. He felt that the Vatican was not defending him and was not denying anything. He saw the months pass without any reaction. It was a year of silence. They left him to simmer slowly, perhaps because he was already an evident candidate for the conclave,” the source said».
Who was supposed to respond to the accusations? It fell to Parolin, head of the Vatican Government, of which Prevost was, in a sense, a minister. And, in any case, it fell to the communication structure, led by Prefect Paolo Ruffini, who in any case depends on Parolin.
Ruffini, prefect like Prevost, fought like a lion, publicly, in defense of the serial abuser Marko Rupnik because he was a friend of the Pope, but never said a word about Prevost, who now lets us know that he suffered a lot because the Church left him to simmer slowly.
In fact, El País closed the June 12 article with an unsettling question for Parolin and his entourage: «It remains to be seen what will happen now that Leo XIV is in charge and knows that a part of the Curia is against him».
Parolin’s Betrayal
Parolin didn’t even pretend to come to Prevost’s aid. Among other things, on the eve of the conclave he too was accused of having collaborated in covering up sexual abuses.
Five days before the conclave, Anne Barrett Doyle, leader of bishop-accountability.org, the international association that documents and denounces sexual abuses by Catholic priests, launched a harsh accusation against the Secretary of State, whom Italian newspapers at that moment gave as the great favorite in the race for the papacy.
Precisely as Secretary of State, according to Bishop-accountability, in the last ten years he has represented, for magistrates around the world, the insurmountable bulwark erected by Pope Bergoglio in defense of the Church’s secret shame, i.e., pedophile priests: investigators from many countries asked him for documents on thousands of cases of pedophile priests. He denied them.
However, among the sensitive documents that Parolin keeps under lock and key is also the «preliminary investigation» on Father Lute that Prevost, then bishop of Chiclayo, sent to Rome in July 2022, just three months after the meeting with the Quispe sisters.
Is it true, as Ana María Quispe claims, that the supposed judicial file consisted of a single sheet, i.e., that it was a mockery? Or are Prevost’s friends right, according to whom it is a full-fledged investigation and in accordance with all norms? Parolin knows the truth and remains silent like a sphinx.
Only on May 27, 2025, twenty days after Prevost’s election and after hundreds of poisoned articles on the Quispe case—with Leo XIV’s men begging him to come out and deny what, according to them, was already a smear campaign not against his rival in the conclave, but against the pope and therefore against the entire Church—Parolin makes a move so absurd that it was unanimously judged as a mockery directed at Prevost, the rival who had snatched from him an election he thought was assured.
Parolin agrees to be interviewed by Vatican News, the Church’s official site, by editorial director Andrea Tornielli, Ruffini’s deputy. Subject of the interview: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. At a certain point, toward the end, Tornielli poses an apparently incomprehensible question: «In the last times of Pope Francis and up to the days before the conclave, there were comments about the actions, in the past, of several Heads of Dicasteries of the Curia regarding complaints they received about abuse cases. Have they been analyzed?»
Parolin’s response is equally incomprehensible, and therefore masterful: «Regarding comments and rumors about the actions of some Heads of Dicasteries of the Roman Curia in relation to complaints of abuse cases when they were diocesan bishops, the verifications carried out by the competent instances, through an examination of the objective and documentary data, have shown that the cases were handled ad normam iuris, that is, according to the norms in force, and were referred by the then diocesan bishops to the competent Dicastery for examination and evaluation of the accusations. The verifications carried out by the competent authorities have not found, definitively, any irregularity in the actions of the diocesan bishops.»
It is true that with this hypocrisy, with this saying and not saying, with this venomous way of not reassuring the faithful that the Pope is not a scoundrel, but rather raising smoke screens with the useless Latin of «ad normam iuris», Parolin and his predecessors have made the enterprise last two thousand years.
But it is also true that perhaps the times have changed and this way of stabbing each other among brothers could prove harmful to the Church at this moment. And this perhaps explains why Robert Prevost is today an anguished man not only for everything we have told, but also for the fear of not having firm control over the government of the Church.
This article was originally published in Italian, you can see it here