The Capuchin Giampiero Gambaro, the canonist who acknowledged before the victims of Chiclayo the negligence in the case file handled under Robert Prevost —now Leo XIV— and who later informed them of the case’s closure through the dispensation from the clerical state, now assumes the General Procuratorship of the Institute of the Incarnate Word by appointment of the pontifical delegate, Monsignor José Antonio Satué. A move that revives the unanswered questions about how Gambaro came to be involved in the most delicate case of the current pontificate.
On August 20, the new governance structure of the Institute of the Incarnate Word (IVE), under Vatican intervention and the full authority of the pontifical delegate, Monsignor José Antonio Satué, Bishop of Málaga, was made public. Through two decrees, dated July 25 and August 18 and ratified by the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life, Satué has formed a general council with a majority of members external to the institute. Among the names, one is especially familiar to InfoVaticana readers: Father Giampiero Gambaro, OFM Cap., who assumes the role of general councilor responsible for the Procuratorship area —precisely the area that manages the institute’s legal relations with the Holy See, as stated in the official document of the IVE general government and on its institutional page.
This is no ordinary institute. The IVE, founded in Argentina, is one of the largest and youngest congregations in the Church, with a missionary presence in sensitive settings such as the Latin parish of the Holy Family in Gaza, and it carries a Roman intervention process with pending complaints that —as the religious press itself has noted when analyzing the decrees— the official documents of the new government do not address: neither the care of victims, nor the status of investigations, nor their outcomes.
Who is Giampiero Gambaro?
According to the official biography published by the IVE itself, Gambaro was born in Genoa in 1959, is a Capuchin, holds degrees in Business Administration and Canon Law, and has served as general bursar and provincial minister of his order in Genoa. His recent career has been in Peru: pro-rector of the Catholic University Sedes Sapientiae in Lima, dean of its Faculty of Law, member of the legal-canon law commission of the Peruvian Episcopal Conference, and judge of the Diocesan Tribunal of Carabayllo (North Lima).
It is worth emphasizing: Gambaro was not a man of Chiclayo. His base was Lima, 770 kilometers from the diocese governed by Robert Prevost. And yet, it was he —a Genoese Capuchin based in the capital— who received from the Bishop of Chiclayo, Monsignor Edinson Farfán, the commission to conduct, as delegate, the penal administrative process against Eleuterio Vásquez González, “Father Lute,” in the abuse case involving minors that directly implicates the management of the now Pope Leo XIV.
The instructor who confirmed the negligence
The recordings revealed by InfoVaticana in November 2025 showed a surprisingly candid Gambaro with the victims. In the meeting of April 23, 2025 at the Carabayllo bishopric —two days after the death of Francis— the instructor described the preliminary investigation ordered by Prevost in 2022 as a “joke”: “Very poorly done. Many errors. A lot of superficiality.” He acknowledged that the accused “was practically not asked anything” and that “he answered nothing”; he admitted errors “even in the Holy See”; he called the dismissal by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on the grounds of an alleged Peruvian civil statute of limitations —which canon law does not contemplate— “most strange”; and he read in full Prevost’s precautionary decree of April 3, 2022, proving that Lute was never suspended from public ministry, contrary to the official version spread by the diocese, by the papal biography of Elise Ann Allen, and by Prevost himself. In another passage, Gambaro even admitted that Lute himself acknowledged the facts although “he does not consider them a crime”.
That candor, incidentally, does not fit the profile of someone close to Prevost. Someone who acknowledges before the victims —with a recorder running, though he was unaware of it— that the case file handled by the current Pope was a “joke” does not seem to be protecting anyone out of personal affinity. The question, then, is different: if he was not a man from Prevost’s circle or from the diocese of Chiclayo, who proposed Gambaro and why?
The false exit: the dispensation as case closure
Because Gambaro’s candor had a very precise limit. In that same April meeting he presented to the victims as “good news” that Lute had requested voluntary dispensation from the clerical state, and he told them that this grace would end the case: there would be no further investigation, as also reported by the organization SNAP in its analysis of the recordings. On November 11, 2025, he communicated by letter that the dispensation had been granted by Leo XIV on September 15, even though the victims had formally asked the Pope not to grant it until there had been an investigation and a sentence. In his letter —also circulated among religious sisters of the diocese and reported by the Peruvian press— Gambaro maintained that the reception and handling of the complaints had been carried out “in accordance with Canon Law.” The same man who had called the investigation a “joke” now certified its regularity.
The underlying thesis —that dispensation from the clerical state extinguishes the case— is not an invention of Gambaro. It has an author and a doctrine: Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, an official of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and commissioner in the Sodalicio case, theorized it in writing in the journal Ius Canonicum of the University of Navarra, in a 2021 academic article titled “The CDF’s praxis on dispensation from clerical obligations: No. 157 of the ‘Vademécum’” (Ius Canonicum, 61/122, pp. 733-765). There Bertomeu defends as “consolidated praxis” offering the accused the possibility of requesting dispensation, expressly acknowledging that this route “interrupts the investigative proceedings or the ongoing process without reaching a conclusion regarding the guilt or innocence of the accused,” and he legitimizes it by invoking the bonum commune. That is: closure without truth or sentence, elevated to a method.
But this construction is legally untenable as an excuse not to investigate. High-ranking Vatican judicial officials have confirmed to InfoVaticana that dispensation from the clerical state does not exempt from investigation or process for the purposes of the Church’s institutional responsibilities: the grace affects the cleric’s personal status, not the Church’s duty to clarify the facts, repair the victims, and purge the responsibilities of those who managed —or mismanaged— the case file. The Vademécum of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith itself regulates in No. 157 the dispensation as a right of the accused, not as a mechanism for archiving. To tell three women who reported abuses suffered between the ages of 9 and 14 that “the case is over” because their abuser has voluntarily returned to the lay state is, quite simply, false.
The questions raised by the appointment
How was the instructor of the Lute case chosen? Formally, he was appointed by Bishop Farfán. But Farfán went looking for a Capuchin from Lima, with no apparent ties to Chiclayo, at the most delicate moment: with SNAP filing its Vos estis complaint on the eve of the conclave and with Prevost’s name in all the betting pools. Was it an autonomous choice by the diocese or was it suggested from Rome?
What relationship exists between Gambaro and Satué? Both are canonists with a curial-disciplinary profile. Satué was an official of the Congregation for the Clergy between 2015 and 2021 —the dicastery that handles a large part of matters relating to the clerical state— and since January 10, 2025, by appointment of Francis, pontifical delegate of the IVE with full powers. As the religious press has highlighted, Satué has formed his team with “people he fully trusts.” That Gambaro is among them just months after steering the closure of the Lute case indicates, at the very least, that Rome knows this Capuchin well and trusts him with cases of maximum sensitivity. Did they already know each other when Gambaro took on the Chiclayo investigation? Did Francis ask his trusted men in disciplinary matters for a safe name for a case that threatened a cardinal who was papabile?
Is the IVE Procuratorship the reward or the continuation? The area Gambaro assumes is precisely the one that articulates the legal relationship of the intervened institute with the Holy See, in a process where there are also pending abuse complaints awaiting response. The pattern is worrying: the canonist who managed the closure without trial of the Lute case now manages the legal front of another major case file.
This is not about presuming bad faith on anyone’s part. It is about noting that the Church still fails to explain who decided what in the Lute case: who chose the instructor, who pushed the dispensation route, who decided not to carry out the pending evidence, and who communicated to the victims —through a sheet without seal or case number— that everything was over. As long as those questions remain unanswered, every new appointment of the protagonists of the case file will inevitably be read in light of that false closure. The victims, meanwhile, still cannot even see the documents of their own case.
The victims of Chiclayo continue to wait for truth, justice, and reparation. And the Church continues to owe them.