We remember it frequently, it is a pending issue for Pope Leo XIV that can give him, we know it is giving him, many headaches. Holiness, resolve it as soon as possible, for your good and for that of the entire Church! Victims of clergy abuses demand an investigation into Pope Leo XIV during his tenure as bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, alleging that he covered up priests and clerics accused of sexual abuse and allowed them to continue in their ministry. Recordings of an April meeting between Giampiero Gambaro, who handles the issue in Chiclayo, Ana María Quispe Díaz, and other accusers of aggressions by Peruvian clerics revealed that the man they accused had confessed to church officials years earlier and received an “honorable discharge” in September. The Chicago Sun-Times reviewed a translated version of the recordings made public by Conclave Watch.
First Christmas of Leo XIV, Holiness, clarify the Chiclayo thing!, the internal dialogue in the church, the Christian nation, programmed profanations?, English vocations, desacralization, knowing Jesus Christ.
In light of the newly discovered recordings, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests plans to file an updated complaint using the » Vos Estis Lux Mundi » model, the Church’s process for documenting abuse complaints or mismanagement of cases. The group stated that these cases are representative of «a system that allows bishops and cardinals to control and close cases that involve them.» “We cannot have another pope in this institutional system who has covered up sexual crimes against minors.” “I’ve been here 35 years, and the only way to change things is with consequences and accountability… We don’t want this to happen to another child.” For now, there is no response from the Vatican.
Díaz, from Chiclayo, Peru, claims to have been abused by a priest when she was 9 years old, and that her two sisters were also assaulted by the same priest. In April 2022, she stated, the three presented their complaints to Pope Leo XIV, then known as Roberto Prevost and bishop of Chiclayo, although he never opened an investigation. According to the New York Times , the Vatican concluded its investigation into the alleged abuses in 2023, after civil authorities declared that the accusations had prescribed. The Vatican told the newspaper that Prevost had exceeded in at least one of the cases. Church officials admitted that the Reverend Eleuterio Vásquez Gonzáles, known as Father Lute, confessed his disgusting behavior. Gambaro stated that “Prevost’s preliminary investigation was carried out very poorly,” calling it a “joke,” and that “the Church’s statute of limitations is clearly very different.” The victims believe it was Prevost who “signed a letter stating that the canonical trial should not be held.” “This is the first time I find myself in a situation like this, in which the civil law statute of limitations is invoked in this way,” Gambaro himself says in the recording. The victims are astonished: «It is incomprehensible that, instead of seeking the truth and repairing the damage caused to the victims, it was decided to close the case through a papal indult that frees the abuser from assuming his responsibility, leaving us in a vulnerable situation without reparation, where the only thing offered to us is the payment for therapy.»
In the afternoon of December 23, the Vatican Secretary of State, Parolin, arrived at the Bambino Gesù headquarters on the Gianicolo and, as is tradition, extended his Christmas greetings to the entire Bambino Gesù Community.
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller has accused the Vatican of applying a harmful double standard, arguing that its constant calls for dialogue and respect are applied selectively and too often hidden from the faithful Catholics themselves. He argued that, while ecclesiastical authorities usually emphasize openness and respect in their interaction with contemporary cultural movements, this spirit is not systematically extended to practicing Catholics, particularly those who wish to attend the traditional Latin Mass. The German cardinal stated that «it was not so positive» that Pope Francis had suppressed the Tridentine rite «in an authoritarian way.» Pope Francis, according to Cardinal Müller, had been “hurting and committing an injustice by accusing all those who love the ancient form of the rite of being against Vatican II in general, without making any distinction between individual justice.” “We do not have a police state system in the Church, nor do we need it, the Pope and the bishops must be good shepherds.” “They constantly talk about dialogue and respect for others when it comes to the homosexual agenda and gender ideology, they talk about respect, but toward their own people, they have no respect.”
It is something that seems one cannot talk about, but it exists. Another case in Camaiore (Lucca) on the night of St. Lucy, that is, between December 13 and 14, in Via XX Settembre, the altar of the Church of the Holy Guardian Angels was profaned with an alleged black mass. The church had been closed for some time due to roof stability problems. Some people found the door open, entered, and found sacred objects used on the altar, broken crucifixes, and “a seal with the date of 9 and 1 inverted.” According to the Archbishop of Lucca, Monsignor Paolo Giulietti the incident could date back to a dark British-origin neo-Nazi sect called «Nine Corners.» The episode must be placed within a long series of profanatory acts that occurred between October and December, which always had as common thread the intimidation of Leo XIV: the «madman» who urinated on the tomb/altar of St. Peter or the convent where St. Carlo Acutis, canonized by Leo, received communion, set on fire on the feast of St. Carlo. The Egyptian immigrant who hung his clothes on the door of the Milan Cathedral, right above the baptistery where St. Augustine was baptized in 387; the two immigrants having sex in the Church of Carmagnola, home of the Venerable Menocchio, an Augustinian bishop loyal to the deposed Pope Pius VII, whose relics are contained in Leo’s pectoral cross; human feces on the altar of the Church of San Nicola de Bari in Ostia, whose patron saint is St. Augustine, on November 25.
For this type of intimidating message, places, dates, and symbols are usually chosen that are simple enough for churchmen to decipher, but inaccessible to the common citizen. The street where the small church is located: Via XX Settembre , a historical date commemorating the conquest of the Papal States with the Breach of Porta Pia. The church dedicated to the Holy Guardian Angels , who watch over the protection, even physical, of believers. The date: the night of December 13, St. Lucy’s day , of Light —a theme par excellence of Gnosticism—, traditionally considered the longest night of the year, in clear reference to darkness and the occult world. By leaving the door open, the profaners evidently wanted it to be known exactly when the profanation occurred —that is, that particular night— because it was part of the “message.” There are no visible signs of forced entry in the lock of the church. Why are the numbers 9 and 1 inverted? The number 91 is linked to divine protection and security thanks to its strong connection with Psalm 91 : “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High… He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways.” Inverting the number 91 could, therefore, reiterate the sense of the affront to the Church of the Guardian Angels: divine protection will do you no good.
The National Office for Vocations in England and Wales reports that in 2024 there were 22 ordinations in the 22 Catholic dioceses of England and Wales, plus the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, compared to the 20 of 2023. The 2024 figure suggests that ordinations to the diocesan priesthood may be stabilizing after a sharp drop in the late 1990s. In the first quarter of the 21st century, annual ordinations have hovered around 20, with occasional peaks due to the influx of former Anglican clergy . Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth said in a pastoral letter of December 14 that “this year, 10 priests have died, but only one was ordained, and this could be the first year in which we send no student to the seminary.” The southern England diocese, which has an average Sunday Mass attendance of 27,550 people , had two priestly ordinations in 2024 and one in 2025. It is projected to have two in 2026 and two in 2027. Ten of the 22 dioceses had no priestly ordinations in 2024. In 2025, two new priests were ordained in the Diocese of Westminster. It is expected that the diocese, which serves about 450,000 Catholics, will have only one priestly ordination in 2026 and another in 2027.
With Christmas and the mystery we celebrate, we have many background articles. We highlight that of Francesco Luigi Gallo on the desacralization of the world that, for at least two centuries, has profoundly transformed our understanding of religion, spiritual power, and, more radically, the sense of life and death. The idea of a progressively secularized society has been articulated with cunning by thinkers like Durkheim, Max Weber, with his famous formulation of the “disenchantment of the world,” and, among others, Bryan R. Wilson, who accurately described the decline of institutional religion in advanced modernity. All these authors —although with different theoretical nuances— share a common idea: that modernity has stripped religion of its monopoly on social and cultural meaning, relegating it increasingly to the private sphere, marginalizing it from public practices, and replacing its normative function with functional, technical, and economic foundations.
In the case of the death of a Pope, this symbolic crisis is aggravated: the Pontiff, in Catholic theology, is not only a religious leader, but also a visible sign of the invisible, a living sacrament of ecclesial unity, and, in some way, a representative of Christ on Earth. His death should therefore be a transcendental event, a symbolic threshold capable of generating a renewed perspective on time and history. That this has not happened, or that it has happened only partially and marginally, is a fact that deserves careful analysis. The lack of a spiritually charged response to the death of Pope Francis reveals something deeper about the state of contemporary imagination. It tells us that the West has lost its sacred languages, has lost the grammar of mystery, has forgotten the art of attributing collective meaning to the final events of life. Death no longer addresses society as a warning, but only as an interruption; the Pope no longer seems to be the living symbol of a shared faith, but, for many, just another public figure, destined to appear in the news.
And to conclude, a suggestive question: Is it possible, through the Scriptures, to reconstruct a psychological portrait of Christ? «In the writings of the Old Testament, God is attributed human traits and feelings. God has a face, hands, fingers, eyes, ears, and feet; He is angry, laments, has pity, mercy, and love. In Jesus Christ, God made man, all this becomes real, visible, and tangible. Therefore, speaking of the spirituality and human personality traits of Jesus, independently of his divinity, is neither heresy nor pure fantasy.» We remain with St. Augustine: “The Creator of man became man, so that man could recognize his Creator”; and with St. Francis of Assisi: “I want to celebrate the memory of the Child who was born in Bethlehem and see with my eyes the discomforts He encountered for lack of what was necessary” and with our St. Teresa: “Look at the Child in the manger and you will see how great His love is.”
With the wish for a holy night that prepares us to celebrate Christmas with joy.
«Blessed be the Lord, God of Israel, because he has visited and redeemed his people.»
Good reading.