The latest interviews granted by Jordi Bertomeu once again exhibit one of the most worrying phenomena of the end of Francis’s pontificate: the conversion of certain complex canonical operations into personalistic platforms directed by officials with scant technical solidity, enormous media exposure, and increasingly weak controls by a papal authority that was clearly deteriorated by age and isolation.
The Sodalicio case is one of the most representative paradigms of how Rome functioned in the final stage of Francis’s pontificate: informal concentration of power, legal improvisation, personal relationships turned into a criterion of government, and secondary officials operating with margins of discretion improper for a serious legal system.
At the center of that model appears Jordi Bertomeu.
It is worth pausing here because the figure of the character is already inseparable from the institutional problem. Bertomeu is not simply an expansive visitor or an overly media-savvy instructor. He is a priest who arrives to induce, through deception, an elderly and physically very deteriorated Pope to sign an excommunication against two lay journalists whose “crime” consisted of denouncing him to civil and canonical justice for an alleged breach of confidentiality. It is worth pausing on the fact because it may seem anecdotal, but it is delirious to extremes hardly compatible with a minimally healthy legal system.
The Caccia-Blanco episode is not a minor accident or a bureaucratic blunder. It is a directly Berlangian scene: an ecclesiastical official denounced for an alleged breach of confidentiality manages to activate the Church’s sanctioning apparatus against those who denounce him, under threat of excommunication, also demanding money and public silence from them. And all of this ends up reaching the signature of an elderly Pontiff who later personally revokes the decree when he understands the legal nonsense that has been placed before him.
That such an episode has had no serious disciplinary consequences for Bertomeu already says quite a bit about the institutional ecosystem in which he operates. If one wanted to be indulgent, that would suffice to discreetly remove him from any sensitive responsibility and return him to a peripheral parish in his native diocese. But in the terminal Rome of Francis’s pontificate, exactly the opposite happened: officials capable of operating aggressively, controlling the narrative, and presenting themselves as implacable executors accumulated more and more space. It is striking that Leo XIV, for the moment, continues to back such a drift.
Bertomeu perfectly embodies that model.
Anyone who knows him minimally knows that he possesses a particularly dangerous combination for someone with instructional functions: constant need for protagonism and absolute incapacity for discretion. He lives pending his image, leaks private conversations, recounts papal confidences with an impropriety unworthy of any minimal institutional sense, and maintains a nearly compulsive relationship with certain ecclesial media always ready to turn each of his displacements into a moral epic.
The problem is not only that he ends up looking ridiculous. The problem is that Canon Law demands exactly the opposite.
The legal logic of a canonical investigation rests on secrecy, strict delimitation of competencies, and the absolute subordination of the instructor to the procedure. When the instructor becomes a media character, the procedure inevitably begins to be contaminated by reputational interests, personal agendas, and public narrative construction.
That is exactly what is beginning to happen with the Sodalicio case.
Bertomeu does not arrive in Peru to become a kind of universal pontifical commissioner for abuses in Latin America. The Church already has ordinary mechanisms to prosecute sexual abuses, abuses of conscience, or abuses of power. Vos Estis Lux Mundi perfectly establishes who investigates, how complaints are processed, and what happens if a bishop fails in his obligations.
The specific mission linked to the Sodalicio was much more limited and much less heroic: to manage the canonical liquidation of certain structures, resolve the ecclesial situation of its members, order the affected patrimony, and, in any case, facilitate and oversee the canonical penal processes derived from Vos Estis Lux Mundi that could lead to the corresponding indemnities, under the same conditions as the rest of the victims of abuses within the Church.
However, Bertomeu’s intervention has progressively derived into something else: a parallel structure for managing abuses articulated around an extraordinary official situated in a nebulous competency where it is no longer clear what belongs to the ordinary channel and what simply depends on personal relationships with Rome.
The truly devastating precedent that this model leaves is very clear.
The practical result, deeply dangerous, is the creation of first-class victims and second-class victims within the Church itself.
The victims linked to the Sodalicio access extraordinary mechanisms, direct interlocution with papal envoys, international attention, specific commissions, and permanent pressure on local authorities. Meanwhile, other Peruvian victims outside the media focus—including complaints related to dioceses like Chiclayo or victims no less than from the General Secretary of the Peruvian Episcopal Conference—remain trapped in the ordinary system, often without responses, without effective follow-up, and, in some cases, without even receiving the formal acknowledgment provided by universal norms themselves.
What is the reason? Some voices are beginning to question whether this preference for the victims of a specific movement is due to the fact that they are, for the most part, white and of European descent. Not so many of the victims of the clergy and the episcopate, who usually belong to indigenous environments or much more vulnerable cultural strata and, therefore, with less capacity to claim their rights.
That destroys one of the most elementary principles of Canon Law: the legal equality of the faithful. The gravity of an abuse cannot depend on the media profitability of the case or the personal interest it arouses in certain Roman officials. But exactly that begins to be institutionalized when universal procedures are replaced by exceptional operations built around charismatic figures of “pontifical trust.”
Furthermore, Bertomeu’s extraordinary interest in personally piloting future indemnities linked to Vos Estis Lux Mundi procedures stands out particularly, de facto invading areas that correspond to the ordinary development of canonical penal processes, while exhibiting a striking impotence when it comes to addressing the true material core of the Sodalitium problem: the identification and eventual recovery of the immense patrimonial network dispersed in foundations, societies, and international structures built over decades.
With Figari still alive, protected, and economically sustained under patrimonial orbits linked to the Sodalitium universe itself, the hyperactive and media-savvy Bertomeu seems incapable even of approaching a genuine lifting of the corporate veil that would allow tracking the real trail of assets, straw men, instrumental foundations, and international financial circuits. He discovers nothing, controls nothing, and dismantles nothing.
Meanwhile, he concentrates enormous energies on public exposure, interviews, and the construction of an epic narrative around himself, in a dynamic that increasingly seems less oriented toward the restoration of canonical justice and more toward the accumulation of personal reputational capital for future episcopal aspirations.
The institutional damage is enormous.
The message that any victim within the Church ends up receiving is very simple: some complaints deserve extraordinary machinery, international visitors, and Roman pressure; others are condemned to rot administratively in irrelevant dioceses without anyone lifting a finger.
And there lies the true underlying legal problem. Canon Law only functions if competencies are delimited, if procedures are universal, and if the application of norms does not depend on personal affinities or parallel power structures. When a legal system begins to replace ordinary rules with exceptionally media-shielded figures, it stops operating according to Law and starts operating according to relationships of influence.
The Bertomeu model does not only call into question the management of the Sodalicio case. It puts at risk the very credibility of the entire canonical legal architecture, because it normalizes exactly what a serious legal system should prevent: arbitrariness, unequal treatment, and informal concentration of power without effective controls.