The Peruvian journalist Pedro Salinas devoted part of the September 2 broadcast of his program La Verdad a Fondo (La República) to responding to the information published by InfoVaticana about Edgard Rimaycuna, personal secretary of Leo XIV, and his status as a disciple of Father Eleuterio Vásquez, “Lute,” the priest from Chiclayo accused of abusing minors.
Salinas, co-author with Paola Ugaz of the investigations into the Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana and one of the voices that most insistently publicly defends Robert Prevost’s management in Peru, did not discuss the facts presented in the article. Instead, he chose to discredit the outlet: he described InfoVaticana as “a digital pamphlet that goes around handing out certificates of Catholicity” and “a spreader of hoaxes, nonsense, and fake news,” and claimed that this newspaper “always subtly shoots at Pope Leo XIV”: “it is never frontal, always targets people in his circle,” something he attributed to “the typical behavior of cowards.”
Salinas’s arguments
Regarding the substance, the journalist raised three objections. The first, that the mention of Rimaycuna in El pastor y los lobos, the book by Santiago Roncagliolo on which the information is based, is unique, and that InfoVaticana’s own article acknowledges that “the book does not impute anything” to the Pope’s secretary. The second, that the only point of connection between Rimaycuna and Lute is having known him, noting that Rimaycuna was not yet a priest at the time of the reported incidents.
The third objection was directed against the victims’ identification of Prevost as “the first person responsible for the case,” which he described as “a stupidity the size of a cathedral”:
“What are they suggesting? That Pope Robert Prevost did not investigate a case of an abusive little priest in Chiclayo and yet went after the powerful Sodalicio? In other words, he was more afraid of Lute than of the Sodalicio?”
Salinas concluded the segment by stating that “when it comes to talking nonsense, InfoVaticana sometimes seems to have no competition.”
What he did not address
In his intervention, Salinas did not address the central elements of the Lute case that remain open: the admission by the ecclesiastical delegate Giampiero Gambaro to the victims that the investigation conducted under Prevost’s responsibility was “a joke,” “very poorly done,” and carried out with “a great deal of superficiality”; the dispensation from the clerical state granted by Leo XIV on September 15, 2025, which was intended to close the canonical process; nor the basic inquiries that the victims continue to demand from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Regarding Roncagliolo’s book, Salinas reiterated his ambivalent assessment: a “superb book” from which “a magnificent portrait of the current Pope” can be drawn, but written “very quickly” and with “glaring omissions and inaccuracies and imprecisions.”