ORáN (ARGENTINA)
The Pillar [Washington DC]
September 26, 2025
By Edgar Beltrán
Bishop Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta was released on parole by an Argentinian court on Friday after serving only part of his four and a half year sentence for aggravated sexual abuse of two seminarians.
In total, Zanchetta only spent about three years and a half under house arrest in a monastery in Orán, including an eight-month hospital stay in Rome between Nov. 2024 and June this year.
Zanchetta was convicted in March 2022 and sentenced to four and a half years in prison for “simple, continued sexual abuse aggravated by the role as a minister of worship.” However, following an appeal supported by local Church authorities, he was allowed to serve his sentence, first in a retired priests’ house, and then in a monastery.
In November 2024, he was allowed to travel to Rome to receive cardiac medical treatment, after his attorneys argued there “were no medical centers in Argentina that guaranteed the necessary conditions for the surgery, and that the procedure in Italy would be cheaper.”
In early June, Matías Montes, one of Zanchetta’s victims and a former seminarian in the Diocese of Nueva Orán, told local media that Zanchetta had arrived back in the country.
“Zanchetta is in Salta, he received the visit of the current Bishop of Orán, they’re preparing a room for him in the monastery, I saw it with my own eyes,” Montes said.
Montes added at the time that Zanchetta was likely to ask for an early release under parole, allowed by the Argentinian criminal code.
“We know he’ll request it, the way is being paved for him… The judicial system did not do a good job. We have no confidence in them in Salta, while the Church is still close to the state, this will continue happening. We were totally abandoned. We wanted to be priests and we had to leave. There was no psychological help, no support, nor real justice.”
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In July 2013, the newly-elected Pope Francis appointed Zanchetta the Bishop of Nueva Orán, one of the first episcopal nominations made by the pope. In 2017, Zanchetta resigned from that office at the age of 53 — 22 years before the normal age.
Zanchetta initially cited health reasons for his early retirement but in January 2019 the Vatican announced that it had received complaints of sexual abuse against Zanchetta months earlier, in late 2018.
Also in January 2019, Zanchetta’s former vicar general in Nueva Orán, Fr. Juan José Manzano, told Associated Press that the Vatican had been presented with allegations of sexual abuse of seminarians and financial misconduct by Zanchetta as early as 2015, and again in 2017, shortly before the bishop presented his resignation to Pope Francis.
Manzano said that Church authorities were alerted both times that Zanchetta had sent sexually explicit “selfies” on his cell phone, and received “obscene” images of young men engaged in sexual contact.
According to Manzano, “the Holy Father summoned Zanchetta [to Rome] and he justified himself saying that his cellphone had been hacked, and that there were people who were out to damage the image of the pope.”
Shortly after Francis accepted his resignation in 2017, the pope created a new curial role for Zanchetta, naming him assessor at the Administration for the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, which functions as the Vatican’s sovereign asset manager and paymaster. Zanchetta lived at the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican hotel and retreat house where Pope Francis also lived.
When the Vatican acknowledged allegations of sexual abuse against Zanchetta in 2019, it also announced the bishop was taking a “leave of absence” from his position at APSA.
Vatican officials also said that a canonical investigation was underway to examine the allegations against the bishop — to date, the conclusions of that investigation have not been announced and no canonical sanctions have been announced against the bishop despite his civil conviction.
In a July 3 improvised press conference after the presentation of the Mass for the Care of Creation, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, was pressed about the investigation against Zanchetta but Fernández just said “he couldn’t answer every question,” before leaving.
Zanchetta returned to work in the Vatican in early 2020, despite the then-ongoing criminal and canonical investigations into the allegations against him.
Zanchetta formally left his role at APSA in June 2021, leaving Vatican City ahead of his trial in Argentina, which began Feb. 21, 2022. Zanchetta was found guilty leading to charges of “aggravated continuous sexual abuse” against two seminarians, for which he was convicted in March 2022 to four and a half years in prison.
On February 4, an appeals’ court rejected Zanchetta’s attempt to overturn his conviction, in which the bishop argued his actions against the seminarian-victims had been subject to “gender stereotyping” because the bishop is homosexual.
Had the court not known of his homosexuality, Zanchetta’s lawyers argued, his actions would have been interpreted as innocent.
The court dismissed the appeal argument as “contrary to reality,” noting the bishop had groped the seminarians and repeatedly put his fingers in their mouths, and that “the sexuality of resting one’s genitals on the bum [of another] is beyond any discussion.”