The Institute of the Incarnate Word is living through the most delicate week in its forty-two years of history. On September 14, the pontifical delegates summoned the provincial superiors of both branches, male and female, in Rome to formally communicate what the tribunals of the Holy See had concluded about the founder, Father Carlos Miguel Buela. Ten days later, Monsignor José Antonio Satué, Sister Clara Echarte, and Sister Simona Brambilla, Prefect of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life, signed a public communiqué, preceded by a longer letter to the members, in which they recalled that two tribunals had reached moral certainty that Buela committed a crime against the sixth commandment with violence against several persons, and in which they announced a re-reading of the charism, the revision of the Constitutions, and criteria for the use of the founder’s images and writings.
Between those two dates, an unsigned document appeared, attributed to major superiors of the Institute, with the thesis that has inflamed the religious family: since the criminal process did not conclude because of the accused’s death, “it does not correspond to the Institute to formulate a judgment of guilt regarding the Founder nor to consider legally concluded a process that did not reach its end.” And today InfoVaticana publishes, in an exclusive worldwide report, the letter that Father Martín Prado has circulated among his brothers: a handwritten note from Francis dated August 2023 in which the Pope writes that “there was no sentence,” accompanied by his reflections on what the Pontiff privately told him about the founder and his accusers.
This is no minor matter nor an internal dispute. The Religious Family of the Incarnate Word brings together more than three thousand religious in forty-five countries, has for three decades been one of the most fruitful sources of vocations in the Hispanic-American Church, and has been under intervention for more than seven years, without its own government, with its seminary closed by Rome and with a community divided between those who accept the truth of the tribunals and those who continue to make pilgrimages to the tomb of their founder. What is being decided now is whether that family can continue to exist with its charism purified like the Legionaries, or whether it will end, like the Sodalitium, in a long agony because of its refusal to look squarely at the man who founded it.
This medium has followed the case with critical distance toward the Roman intervention and has not concealed its reservations about some of the names now governing the Institute. Precisely for that reason, we believe we must clearly state what the legal analysis of the case requires.
This is not the Lute case
Just three weeks ago we denounced in these pages the stratagem that emerged from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to close abuse cases without trial or reparation: the dispensation from priestly obligations turned into a shortcut to avoid the penal process. The Lute case in Chiclayo is the most complete example of that method: a case extinguished without investigation, through an instrumental dispensation, irregular in form and immoral in substance, which left the victims without truth and the accused without a trial. We described it as unlawful and we continue to maintain that.
It is worth stating with equal clarity that the case of Father Buela is precisely the opposite.
A process of truth
The accusations against Buela were not resolved by decree or by negotiated dispensation. Cardinal Santos Abril y Castelló established in May 2020 a Special Penal Tribunal, collegiate in nature, which heard the accused, his lawyer, and numerous witnesses before issuing a sentence in July 2021. That sentence identified five concrete victims and classified the facts as a crime against the sixth commandment committed with violence, the figure of canon 1395 §2.
The defense appealed. A second tribunal, constituted in November 2021, carried out a supplementary investigation, requested documents, again heard the accused, and admitted the witnesses proposed by his counsel. In March 2023 it voted to confirm the conviction in full. Two panels of judges, each with its own investigation, reached the same conclusion regarding the same five cases.
Witnesses, adversarial proceedings, legal defense, reasoned sentence, appeal, and new investigation. It is the complete catalog of guarantees that canon law offers an accused, and Buela had them all.
Where the stratagem lies
The founder died twenty-four days after the appellate tribunal voted to confirm his conviction. The second-instance sentence was never drafted or published, and in June 2023 the judge decreed the extinction of the case. On that three-week gap, the major superiors of the Institute have built, in an anonymous document circulated after the Rome meeting of September 14, the thesis that “it does not correspond to the Institute to formulate a judgment of guilt regarding the founder.”
That is where the trap lies. The publication of the sentence (canon 1614) is the requirement for the penalty to produce effects against the convicted person: so that he may know it, challenge it, and serve it. It is a guarantee for the accused, and the accused has died. Death extinguishes the penal action, that is, the possibility of punishment. It does not extinguish the facts, it does not extinguish the evidence presented, and it does not extinguish the moral certainty that two tribunals reached after hearing the accused. The decree of extinction does not absolve anyone nor revoke the first-instance sentence, which continues to exist as a valid, reasoned, and notified act.
To claim that the lack of procedural effects prevents a moral judgment is deliberately to confuse two planes. A tribunal does not create the truth of the facts by publishing the sentence; it declares it. The declaration was voted, recorded in the minutes, and reproduced by the pontifical delegates with its literal tenor: “it is established that he committed the offense… the first-instance condemnatory sentence must be confirmed.” Whoever maintains that this does not allow judging the founder’s conduct is not defending a procedural guarantee; he is using a chronological accident to evade an uncomfortable truth.
It is, at bottom, the same operation we denounced regarding the dispensation: replacing judgment on the facts with a formal maneuver. In Chiclayo the maneuver prevented a trial from taking place. In the IVE the maneuver seeks to ensure that a trial which did take place, with all its guarantees, does not count.
What Father Prado’s letter objects to
Father Martín Prado, in the letter we publish today exclusively, raises three objections that deserve a response.
The lifting of the statute of limitations is the ordinary practice of the Holy See in abuse cases for more than two decades, provided for in the norms on reserved offenses and applied to hundreds of clerics. To maintain that Buela was treated with special harshness because of it is equivalent to claiming that the general rule was an exception.
The alleged partiality of the tribunal deserves more attention, because it is the argument most circulated among members of the Institute: “the accuser appointed the judges.” This is inaccurate in its premise. The one who constituted the tribunal was the pontifical commissioner, Cardinal Abril y Castelló, and the commissioner is not the accuser. He is the representative of the Holy See at the head of an institute under intervention, with governing authority, and the accusation was sustained by the promoter of justice with the victims’ complaints. It is admissible that more independent mechanisms were conceivable, such as referral to a tribunal outside the intervention, and it would be desirable for the Holy See to adopt them as a rule. But from there to partiality is a stretch that the procedure itself disproves: a predisposed tribunal does not carry out a supplementary investigation at the defense’s request nor admit the witnesses it proposes. Impartiality is measured by actions, and the actions here withstand scrutiny.
To gauge what such a process means, it is worth recalling the ridiculous commissariat of Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu in the Sodalitium, where the commissioner himself acts as judge of any non-process, issues precepts, and threatens excommunications without any tribunal, and in parallel recommends in writing the use of the grace of dispensation to close investigations without a sentence. That is indeed a model in which accuser, investigator, and judge are confused in a single person. In the Buela case there was a collegiate tribunal distinct from the commissioner, two instances, and an accused with defense. They are different worlds.
Nor will we conceal what is disturbing in the current dossier. Among those responsible appointed by Monsignor Satué is, at the head of the Institute’s General Procuratorship, the Capuchin Giampiero Gambaro, the same canonist who in Chiclayo acknowledged before the victims that the preliminary investigation of the Lute case had been a “mockery” and later communicated to them the closure of the case through dispensation from the clerical state. He is responsible for at least one case resolved with that absolutely negligent practice, and his presence in the IVE leadership seems to us an error. That said, the solidity of the process against Buela does not depend on Gambaro, who was not a judge in it nor intervened in either of the two instances. The tribunals that convicted the founder were constituted and decided years before his arrival.
The private conversations in which Francis allegedly downplayed the accusations are, at best, the benevolent opinion of one friend about another. Against them stand the conclusions of two tribunals that the Pope himself authorized, which examined evidence he never saw and which spoke of violence. A Pontiff may have a more indulgent judgment of someone than his judges do. That indulgence is not an act of governance and does not count as evidence.
“Clericalism stuff”
The handwritten note we publish today has historical value. Francis writes that “the IVE matter is somewhat stalled,” that he had already ordered the appointment of a provincial and the convocation of the General Chapter, and that the interested parties “were very concerned about knowing the ‘final sentence’… but there was no sentence. (Clericalism stuff).”
The founder’s supporters present this letter as proof that the process came to nothing. It says exactly the opposite. In August 2023 the Pope knew perfectly well that there was no published sentence and considered it a curial trifle, a matter of paperwork that did not change the essential point: that the Institute had to begin walking under a new government because the founder’s question was, in his eyes, resolved. His disdain for formalism, so characteristic, has here an ironic effect: those who today cling to the absence of a signature invoke the testimony of one who precisely despised that argument.
What is truly at stake: the cult of the founder
The sector of the Institute that takes shelter behind the unpublished sentence does not dispute the revision of the Constitutions nor the appointment of provincials; Father Prado himself asks that this revision begin as soon as possible. What it seeks is something else: that, since there is no final sentence, no one can oblige the Institute to renounce public recognition and exaltation of Father Buela. His tomb continues to be a destination for pilgrimages, his writings continue to be formative texts, his image presides over houses and chapels, and all of this is defended with the argument that his guilt “is not established.”
The delegates have announced that criteria will be set for the use of the founder’s images and writings. That is the real battle. The thesis that without a published sentence there can be no moral judgment is the legal instrument of a pastoral claim: to continue venerating as a saint a man whom two tribunals declared the author of violent abuses against five of his own religious. No institute has the right to that, with or without a sentence, and the Holy See cannot consent to it without repeating the error of the Legionaries of Christ, where devotion to the founder survived more than a decade after the evidence of his crimes.
The solidity of the Roman position
We said at the beginning: no one will take us for supporters of Vatican commissariats or of Monsignor Satué. But in this case the Roman action and the communiqué of September 24 maintain solid coherence. They rest on a real judicial process, on two concordant decisions of collegiate tribunals, and on a moral certainty obtained with all guarantees. The delegates have not invented a guilt; they have recalled the one two tribunals declared, and they have asked the institutes to accept it as a prior step to the revision of the charism.
The Holy See does not need a final sentence to govern a religious institute. Canons 590 and 592 grant it that authority, and to exercise it the moral certainty of its own organs suffices. That the superiors of the IVE oppose that certainty with an anonymous document is, in addition to being legally inconsistent, an added cruelty toward five victims to whom two tribunals gave reason.