The Peruvian victims who do not appear in the journey of Leo XIV

Pope Leo XIV lands in Peru on Wednesday the 11th with a meeting with abuse victims on the agenda and, according to all indications, with the list of attendees closed around a single case, that of the Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana. The Holy See announced at the end of October that during the trip there would be meetings with people who suffered abuse by members of the clergy and the Church, without specifying who or where. What is clear is who has managed it and for whom. And what does not appear on any known invitation is the rest of the Peruvian victims, starting with those from the diocese that the Pope himself governed.

The pontifical commissioner Jordi Bertomeu explained it in writing in a letter to the victims of the Sodalicio: as soon as the trip was confirmed, he began the arrangements for the Pope to meet with them, “because of the magnitude of the tragedy you have suffered” and because, in his view, the case sets a precedent. Religión Digital has reported that a meeting with survivors of the Sodalicio is planned in Peru and places it in Lima. José Enrique Escardó, the group’s first whistleblower, claims instead that the meeting will be on Saturday the 14th in Chiclayo, that he learned of it from a foreign journalist, and that the nuncio, Paolo Rocco Gualtieri, and the president of the Peruvian Episcopal Conference, Carlos García Camader, have left him out in a selection of attendees designed to sideline critics. Neither the Holy See nor the Nunciature has confirmed the place, date, or composition.

No one disputes the right of those victims to be in the room. They have been sustaining their complaints for years; at the end of October, two groups of 33 and 75 survivors publicly asked to be received, and the second warned that the suppression of the Sodalicio cannot remain a mere formality while its economic structure remains intact. According to the victims themselves, Bertomeu heard more than 250 people in May. Also belonging to that case are the community members of Catacaos, in Piura, before whom the commissioner and cardinals Carlos Castillo and Pedro Barreto knelt that same month to ask forgiveness, with the admission that the Church should have arrived twenty years earlier. That room is not the issue. It is the other list: that of the victims who have no one to manage their access to the Pope, as Bertomeu says he has done with those of the Sodalicio.

That list begins in Chiclayo. Ana María Quispe and two other victims reported to the then-bishop, Robert Prevost, the abuse they say they suffered as girls at the hands of two priests of the diocese, Eleuterio Vásquez González, Father Lute, and Ricardo Yesquén Paiva. According to the diocese, Prevost sent the preliminary investigation file to Rome on July 21, 2022. The Capuchin Giampiero Gambaro, later appointed delegate for Lute’s cause, acknowledged to the sisters that that first instruction had been seriously deficient. On November 13, 2025, they were informed in writing that the Pope had granted Lute, at the priest’s own request, dispensation from the clerical state, which closes the canonical process. Yesquén died in July in Ferreñafe without having been tried. Ana María Quispe, who maintains that there were more victims, requested a personal audience with the Pope after the dispensation. There is no record that any of the three has been summoned.

On Saturday the 14th, after presiding over the coronation of the Immaculate Conception in the cathedral of Chiclayo, the Pope will fly by helicopter to Santa Cruz de Succhabamba, in the mountains of Cajamarca, to celebrate Mass. Santa Cruz belongs to the diocese of Chiclayo and Prevost visited it as bishop during the feasts of the Lord of the Side. It is also the province where, according to a statement in December 2023 by Monsignor Guillermo Cornejo, then head of the diocese, Lute had been for a year. Cornejo added that the priest had acknowledged the reported facts. To a journalist who claimed that Lute had celebrated Mass fifteen days earlier, he replied that he had contacted him to order him not to do so, and summarized the diocesan position with a formula: they were concerned about the victims and also accompanied the priests, because “we are pastors of all.” If Escardó is right, that same Saturday is the day of the meeting with the victims of the Sodalicio.

Huacho is the most recent case. Antonio Santarsiero Rosa, bishop of that diocese since 2004 and secretary general of the Episcopal Conference, was denounced on March 26, 2026, through a notarized letter delivered by hand to the Nunciature in Lima for alleged sexual abuse of a seminarian when he was an adolescent; a priest who was his secretary also accuses him of explicit sexual conduct, psychological manipulation, and retaliation. Santarsiero has categorically denied the accusations. He left the secretary generalship of the Episcopal Conference on April 9; that same month, the complainants had not received any acknowledgment of receipt of their complaint from the Church. On July 15, a little more than a month after he turned 75, the Pope accepted his resignation without explaining the reasons.

In the mountains of La Libertad, the matter came to light in 2020, when La República published accusations against priests from Trujillo and the prelature of Huamachuco. One of them, Manuel Mendoza Ruiz, was denounced in 2015 for touching a fifteen-year-old adolescent on the return from a retreat in Chimbote; he was suspended in 2016, the minor’s mother filed a criminal complaint in May 2017, and the restrictions on his ministry were later modified. In a video recorded during a 2016 priestly retreat, the then-bishop of Huamachuco, Sebastián Ramis, explained to that mother what he had done with her complaint: “Pam, pam, I tore it up.” Ramis claimed that she had told him she did not want to proceed. She ended up going to the Prosecutor’s Office.

In the highlands of Puno, the prelature of Juli lost its bishop in September 2025. Ciro Quispe López, with no relation to the victim from Chiclayo, had been under an apostolic visitation since July 2024 for accusations of relations with at least a dozen women, including religious sisters and novices, and diversion of funds. He attributed them to a defamation campaign. The Holy See accepted his resignation on September 24 without giving details about the outcome of the visitation. It is not about abuse of minors, but complaints of abuse of power over adult women, several of them under his authority.

On November 5, in Lima, the U.S. organization BishopAccountability presented a database with 77 priests, religious, seminarians, and consecrated laypeople publicly accused of sexually abusing minors in Peru. Nine have been convicted by Peruvian courts and one in the United States. It includes former bishop Santarsiero, Lute, Yesquén, and Mendoza Ruiz. The organization warns that its register is a small fraction of the total and recalls that, when those data were requested from the Episcopal Conference in 2019, a representative responded that “the number of cases has been minimal” and pointed to that of the Sodalicio as the most publicized.

Comparing some victims with others would be indecent; the disproportion lies in the institutional response. Those of the Sodalicio have had a commissioner, a listening mission, a suppression decree, and an act of forgiveness with two cardinals on their knees. The victims of Chiclayo, a dispensation that closes the case without a trial. The complainants of Huacho, a resignation without explanations. The women of Juli, another resignation without details. The mother from Huamachuco, a torn-up complaint. The motto of the Peruvian stage of the trip is “Let us open our hearts.” What the trip has not clarified is who decides how many fit in the room.

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