The controversy that has arisen within the Institute of the Incarnate Word revolves around an apparently simple question: was Father Carlos Miguel Buela condemned? The answer requires distinguishing between what the courts decided, what was eventually published, and what the founder’s death left without effect. The documents released by the pontifical delegates in recent days allow each step of the case to be reconstructed with precision.
The court of first instance
On 14 May 2020, Cardinal Santos Abril y Castelló, then pontifical commissioner of the Institute, established by decree a Special Penal Tribunal to examine the complaints lodged against the founder. It was a collegiate tribunal delegated by the Holy See, not a diocesan tribunal or an administrative instance of the Dicastery.
After a procedure in which the accused, his lawyer and numerous witnesses were heard, the tribunal handed down its sentence on 20 July 2021. It found it proven that Buela had committed the offence under canon 1395 §2 of the Code of Canon Law, a crime against the sixth commandment committed with violence, to the detriment of five members and former members of the Institute, identified in the records by the letters A, B, C, D and E.
That sentence was notified to the accused and appealed by his defence. The appeal, in accordance with canon 1638, suspends the execution of the sentence, but not its existence. Since July 2021, therefore, there has existed a valid, published and appeal-pending condemnatory sentence of first instance.
The appeal
On 5 November 2021 a Special Penal Tribunal of Appeal was constituted. According to the letter that Monsignor José Antonio Satué and Sister Clara Echarte addressed to the members of both institutes on 23 September last, the second instance carried out an extensive supplementary investigation: it requested documents, heard the accused again and took statements from several witnesses proposed by his lawyer.
On 30 March 2023 the college of judges deliberated and voted on the case. The text of the decision, reproduced in the delegates’ letter, is unequivocal: it states that the accused committed the offence under canon 1395 §2 in cases A, B, C, D and E, and therefore the condemnatory sentence of first instance must be confirmed with regard to the offence committed.
The death of the accused
Buela died in Genoa on 23 April 2023, twenty-four days after that vote. The appeal sentence was never drafted or published. On 7 June 2023 the judge issued a decree extinguishing the case.
Here lies the key to the entire discussion. In canonical procedure, as in any collegiate process, the decision is taken during the judges’ deliberation (canon 1609). The sentence is drafted afterwards (canon 1610) and only produces legal effects once it is published (canon 1614). The vote of 30 March was already a real procedural act, recorded in the minutes; what was lacking was its formalisation and notification.
What effect does the death of the accused have?
The death of the accused extinguishes the penal action. No one can be sanctioned after death, and the process whose purpose was to impose a penalty loses its reason for being. The decree of extinction of June 2023 merely records that fact. It does not absolve, does not revoke the sentence of first instance and contains no assessment of the facts.
Nor did res judicata occur. In canon law, res judicata requires two conforming sentences (canon 1641, 1º), and the second was never published. Against a double conforming sentence there is no ordinary appeal (canon 1629, 2º), so that, had it been published, that appeal sentence would have definitively closed the case. There was no pending third instance.
The extraordinary remedies provided for in the Code, the complaint of nullity (canons 1619 to 1627) and the restitutio in integrum (canons 1645 to 1648), presuppose a published sentence and the standing of the party to the process. The Institute was not a party to the penal case against its founder.
The two readings
The communiqué signed on 24 September by Satué, Echarte and Sister Simona Brambilla, Prefect of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life, maintains that both tribunals reached moral certainty regarding Father Buela’s responsibility and that this conclusion must be accepted by the institutes.
An unsigned document attributed to major superiors of the IVE, circulated after the meeting held in Rome on 14 September, argues that the penal process did not conclude because of the accused’s death and that, consequently, it is not for the Institute to formulate a judgment of guilt concerning the founder.
The Institute’s assertion is true only in its literal sense. There was a valid and notified condemnatory sentence, there was a collegiate decision on appeal that confirmed it after its own investigation, and the only thing that was lacking was the publication of that second sentence because of the accused’s death. Publication is the requirement for the penalty to produce effects against the condemned person; it is not the requirement for the facts declared by two tribunals to exist. The extinction of the penal action prevents punishment, and nothing more. The moral certainty reached in two instances, with witnesses, defence and adversarial proceedings, remains intact, and upon it rests the power of governance that canons 590 and 592 recognise to the Holy See over religious institutes.
Behind the procedural discussion lies a practical question that the delegates’ documents expressly address: the use of the founder’s images and writings, for which criteria are announced. A large part of the members of the Institute who invoke the absence of a published sentence do so in order to maintain that they cannot be required to renounce public recognition and veneration of Father Buela, whose tomb continues to be a place of pilgrimage. The delegates, for their part, have linked acceptance of the truth established by the tribunals to the path of re-reading the charism that now opens.
Full information on the letter and communiqué of the pontifical delegates may be consulted.