(PERU)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
May 4, 2026
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
When comparing Leo XIV’s proactive attitude in the United States with what happens in Peru it is impossible not to wonder what is amiss in Lima.
As it happened when he was the bishop of Chiclayo, the way the Peruvian Catholic Church handles abuse is dead weight for Leo XIV.
How long before Leo XIV figures out the need for more decisive action in Peru and the rest of Latin America when dealing with similar sets of issues?
As a recurring nightmare, Robert Prevost’s handling of clergy sexual abuse cases during his days as bishop and cardinal come back to haunt a Papacy already under Donald Trump’s attack.
Although from the Global South it is a delightful experience to see how Leo XIV’s approval rates skyrocket in the United States and elsewhere when compared with Trump’s, it is impossible to forget that such a surge comes at a time when Peruvian cases Prevost handled both as bishop and later as prefect in Pope Francis’s curia keep haunting him, more so as new claims about Peruvian cases force one to wonder how committed is the Pope to eradicate the scourge of abuse from the Catholic Church.
Chances are the issue is not his own personal preferences, but a combination of structural deadlocks of the institution he leads and the dismissive attitude of many bishops all over the world, still doing their best to render themselves victims of the modern world.
As this series noticed when allegations begun haunting then Cardinal Prevost, back in 2024 (see the story below), when he was prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops, abuse-wise, he was ahead of the curve when compared to the rest of the Peruvian bishops.
He brought to his diocese and Peru at large years of expertise as to how to handle and prevent abuse. Yet, as that story told way before his election as Pope, there are striking differences in the way the Catholic Church deals with the painful experiences of their faithful.
[English Edition
From Chicago to Chiclayo, sexual abuse victims are pawns]
While in the United States, Canada and a few European countries, there is the will to actually acknowledge the plight of their faithful, often the most loyal of the Catholic flock, those willing to fully trust their leaders, in Latin America bishops dismiss victims while protecting predators in ways reminiscent of what used to happen back in the early 1980s when the first symptoms of the current large-scale crisis emerged in Catholic dioceses of Louisiana.
Roots of the difference
The differences are not the byproduct of doctrinal disagreements. They stem, on the one hand on the disparities in how systems of justice comply or not with their goals and, on the other, on how the religious leaders understand their own roles and how they perform their duties.
As close as Prevost was to Francis during his days as bishop in Peru or precisely because of that, he was also a lone ranger. Prevost’s position at CEP, as the Peruvian Bishops Conference is known in the Spanish-speaking world, was similar in that respect to some of the few U.S. bishops who were willing to stand with Francis as Pope.
[PHOTO: Standing in the middle of the hall, bishop García Camader reads a message to Pope Leo XIV on behalf of the Peruvian Conference of Bishops. Picture published by the diocese of Lurín social media on January 30, 2026.]
That was the case of Blase Cupich, the archbishop and cardinal of Chicago, who as much as Prevost at CEP was the dissonant voice in a choir whose members were way too used to sing the repertoire they learnt by heart during John Paul II’s papacy and perfected during Benedict XVI’s when abortion or “the defense of life” was the “preeminent priority.”
In both cases, despite the carefully manicured statements from the conferences of bishops, both Cupich and Prevost stood apart, unable to redirect the U.S. and Peruvian bishops to better align themselves with Francis’s priorities. These days, however, even if in the United States around Leo XIV there seems to be more will to understand what is at stake, in Peru old habits are hard to break.
How much this depends on the Pope himself is a major issue. In the United States, setting abuse aside, at a time when the Supreme Court of the United States performs what some observers call a silent reenactment of the Jim Crow Laws, Leo XIV keeps betting as hard as he is able on what many could call “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion” appointments of new bishops, among the most notable those of Evelio Menjívar-Ayala and Robert P. Boxie.
Menjívar-Ayala had already been promoted to bishop by Pope Francis in 2022 as auxiliary in Washington, D.C. Now, Pope Prevost promotes him to lead Wheeling-Charleston, a Catholic diocese that is coterminous with the state of West Virginia.
Menjívar-Ayala becoming the head of a diocese comes at a time when migrants, especially someone like him, who left El Salvador in the midst of widespread violence and who entered the United States without the formalities of the case, have become the preferred target of the second Trump administration.
As a replacement of sorts, Leo XIV appointed Robert Paul Boxie as new auxiliary in the U.S. capital. He is a priest with an impressive vita, including a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, a law degree from Harvard, experience as teacher in France, as a lawyer and more recently a stint as Catholic chaplain at Howard College, a “historically black” college having as its most prestigious alum the former Vice Presidente Kamala Harris.
Institutional survival
It would be hard to argue against the idea of Prevost is doing his best to send clear messages about the role of the Catholic Church in the United States. Even the most fervent critics of Pope Francis have been forced by Trump’s excesses to pause their support for the U.S. President, as the clash on issues such as migration has turned into a matter of institutional survival, as the Catholic Church has been forced to end programs in dioceses such as Miami or El Paso supporting migrant populations.
Sadly, there is nothing similar happening in Peru. Granted, none of the Presidential candidates there seems to have an interest in picking up a fight with the Pope, even if issues such as clergy sexual abuse remain a constant.
More so as, almost at the same time Ronald Hicks, the newly appointed archbishop of New York, a former auxiliary of Cupich, finalized a settlement with a large number of survivors of clergy sexual abuse in his archdiocese, while other dioceses in New York State, are on their way to reach similar agreements, new evidence of mishandling of sexual abuse emerges from Peru.
[Start spreading the news: Hicks gets the New York Archdiocese]
Once again, as this series has been proving over comparisons between what happens in the dioceses of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, or in the dioceses of California in the United States and those in the Mexican Baja Californias, the issue is not the individual bishops’ personal character, but the differences between the systems of justice in Mexico and United States.
[El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, contrasting responses to sexual abuse]
No institution will go on its volition through what happens these days in the state of New York. Beyond the catchy headlines about how Hicks finalizes the settlement in New York City, in Upstate New York one witnesses the destruction of Catholic parishes, forced to contribute to the settlements that, many years after the abuse, offer some measure of justice to the victims.
Even in countries where the Catholic Church is volunteering to offer that kind of solution, as it has happened so far in France and Germany, and even more recently in Spain, it is probably the byproduct of political calculation: the realization that if there was no attempt at all to acknowledge the consequences of abuse, what comes next is the politicization of the issue.
But still, whether one looks at the state of New York or at the national conferences of Catholic bishops in France, Germany or Spain, one has to wonder why none of that is happening from Mexico to Argentina and Chile and more so, why the Peruvian Catholic bishops, far from leading the charge to actually walk the walk of “communion with Rome”, do as much as they can to stall the issue, to hide behind Leo XIV’s protagonism as some champion of the Global South in his fight with Donald Trump, while doing little or nothing to address the clergy sexual abuse crisis there.
Opposite camps
A couple of weeks ago this series went over the accusations brought against Antonio Santarsiero Rosa, bishop of Huacho, one of seven so-called suffragan dioceses to the archdiocese of Lima, the country’s capital.
It is hard to imagine Prevost being in cahoots with Santarsiero Rosa when both used to be in opposite camps in the internal politics of the Peruvian Conference of Catholic Bishops, with Prevost’s takes on Church issues frequently standing in sharp contrast with those of Santarsiero’s patron, the once mighty Opus Dei former archbishop of Lima, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani.
[Pilgrimaging through Africa: A Peruvian State of Mind]
Sadly, unlike what happens in the United States, where at least for now, the USCCB seems to have become aware of how dangerous it was its bet on abortion as the “preeminent priority,” in Peru it is hard to find a similar scenario.
Even if publicly the bishops there seem to enjoy having a former member of CEP as the Pontiff, fact is just as they were in no rush to actually follow Francis’s pastoral insights or even instructions, they are now much more concerned into figuring out how they will handle the imminent second round of the presidential election, while protecting their interests, than in supporting or promoting Leo XIV’s agenda.
As any given bureaucracy, the Peruvian bishops are mostly concerned with their own survival and protection. They share interests, approaches, and basic understandings of certain issues but, unlike the kind of signals Leo XIV is sending to the U.S. bishops, the leaders of the Catholic Church in Peru seem to be in no rush to promote any meaningful change.
If that was not enough, there is the issue that in the minds of some media, an attack on any given Peruvian bishop is a way to prove their own takes on who Leo XIV actually is and, more significantly, a way for some of them to bring him into submission, proving he was as a bishop not better than any other given bishop, in Peru or elsewhere.
If the Catholic world should have learnt something of what has been the history of clergy sexual abuse in the Peruvian Sodalitium is that the Catholic elites there were more than willing to cover up as many cases as possible, and that they had extremely powerful allies in the Peruvian and the U.S. far-rights willing to do their bidding, willing to use whatever resource at their reach, whether in Peru or in the United States, to silence denunciations of abuse in any given diocese.
And, sadly, even if he was ahead of the curve in some aspects of prevention during his rather brief tenure as bishop of Chiclayo, his performance was not as effective as required, and later, already in Rome, his handling of cases related to other Peruvian dioceses was less than stellar, forcing the survivors of sexual abuse to the usual rounds in Spanish- and English-speaking media to remind the world about the mishaps of both bishop and cardinal Prevost, whether at Chiclayo or at Rome.
[PHOTO: Carlos Enrique García Camader, bishop of Lurín, Peru, during an open air Mass, March 23, 2026. From his diocese’s social media.]
Latest addition
The most recent of such cases comes from Lurín, the diocese whose bishop, Carlos García Camader, is the current president of CEP. What is worse, even if Omar Sánchez Portillo, the latest addition to the list of Catholic priests with standing accusations of clergy sexual abuse is on paper nothing but a parish priest, the pastor of the Saint Mary parish (content in Spanish), he is also the visible figure of a large-scale media operation.
For comparison sake, while Sánchez Portillo runs at least two Facebook profiles (Asociación de las Bienaventuranzas and Padre Omar Buenaventura) with 185 thousand and 94 thousand followers, respectively, the diocese of Lurín’s Facebook profile sits at ten or five percent those numbers, with only 18 thousand followers. CEP’s Facebook profile stands at merely 52 thousand followers. Even the archdiocese of Lima, the oldest in South America, barely has 158 thousand followers at that platform.
And even if he seems to be unwilling to ever appear without his black cassock, perhaps trying to telegraph how committed he is as a priest, back in March, Sánchez Portillo used his social media to share pictures with Argentine now retired footballer Ricardo Gareca who, besides his own career, is a celebrity for being the most successful coach of the Peruvian national soccer team.
[PHOTO: Maju Mantilla, Ricardo Gareca and Omar Sánchez Portillo, March 2026. From Sánchez Portillo’s social media.]
The pictures were not the usual “name dropping” of an influencer trying to get some traction from celebrities with their own spaces in legacy media. They were an announcement about how Sánchez Portillo was ready to play kingmaker, to force presidential candidates for the chaotic first round of the Peruvian election into his own kind of political activism. A third party to the series, besides Sánchez Portillo and Gareca was Maju Mantilla, a former beauty queen who has transitioned, as Gareca, into a legacy media figure.
In that respect, it is really hard to imagine a scenario where García Camader would actually probe the accusations of clergy sexual abuse raised against Sánchez Portillo. No wonder the victim and his lawyers moved the case to Rome, out of Peru where, as it is usually the case as all over Latin America, systems of justice have plenty of ways to stall any case even in its very early stages.
Mexican mirrors
One only needs to look at the kind of scandal that Mexican survivors of the Luz del Mundo (Light of the World) Church had been forced to do to force the Mexican government to reopen the cases against Naasón Joaquín García, the leader of that religious organization, who is already in jail for sexual abuse in California, and currently waits for a U.S. federal trial.
Why was the Mexican head of State forced to intervene to reopen this case, the very definition of a “gimme,” as the hard work has already been done by the state of California, is anybody’s guess.
Mexico managed to “close” a case tied to a religious leader already convicted in California, then reopened it only after victim pressure and the sitting President having a chance to play hero: an anatomy of performative accountability rather than common sense justice.
And if in the case of politicians it is possible to understand why the need for the performative aspect of justice, as they are forced to seek votes, it is almost impossible to understand why would Leo XIV, the same Pope making common sense calls to address global hunger, forces victims of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church to do what Mexican victims of the Luz del Mundo were forced to do in their own country.
Sánchez Portillo’s case is ever more complex because of the very nature of the Peruvian system of justice. When the Peruvian journalists still cheer at Popes Francis’s and Leo XIV’s decisive action when dealing with the Sodalitium, they are implicitly criticizing the abusive policemen, district attorneys, and judges that were more than willing to harass them to keep the members of the Sodalitium and many of his friends at CEP happy by enforcing laws where sexual abuse quickly becomes impossible to prosecute.
It is a system more entrenched than the ones in Mexico, Chile or Argentina, as even if Catholicism is not the official religion of the Peruvian State, bishops receive what amounts to a salary from the Peruvian Treasury, even if these payments are formally defined as “assignations.”
And this is not the first time García Camader, the bishop of Lurín is close to the kind of scandal brought by accusations of clergy sexual abuse. Back in July 2013, a few months after Benedict XVI’s resignation and Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s election as Francis, the current president of CEP saw one of his protégées, Guillermo Martín Abanto Guzmán, the former Peruvian Military bishop forced out of office in the midst of a scandal.
[PHOTO: Guillermo Martín Abanto Guzmán, emeritus military bishop of Peru. Undated, uncredited picture, originally published by the prelature of Caravelí, Peru, ca. 2012.]
Incentivizing scandal
Abanto Guzmán, then 49, had to resign after a female sought to force him to acknowledge the paternity of at least one daughter. His case is relevant not only because of the scandal as such, but because he was a former auxiliary of Cipriani who was consecrated by Cipriani himself, García Camader and another auxiliary from Lima, Italian Franciscan Adriano Tomasi Travaglia, at a ceremony on April 19, 2009.
Less than 4 years later, a reflection of Cipriani’s influence in key appointments in the Peruvian Catholic Church, Abanto Guzmán became the head of the military diocese, one of the most tangible symbols of how intertwined the Peruvian Church and State remain, only to be forced out of office less than year later.
Whoever was in charge of vetting Abanto Guzmán’s original appointment as auxiliary of Lima and more so his promotion as military bishop made a major mistake. At the time of his forced resignation, Abanto Guzmán’s daughter was already 3 years old, so chances are he was already involved in some kind of relation with the mother little after he was consecrated bishop, if not before.
That would place his promotion to bishop during Italian archbishop Bruno Musarò’s tenure as apostolic nuncio to Peru (2009-11) and later during U.S. archbishop James Patrick Green’s who took over in 2011 and remained there until 2017.
[PHOTO: At center, then Apostolic Nuncio to Peru, archbishop James Patrick Green. To the left, Salvador Piñeiro García-Calderón, archbishop of Ayacucho. To the right, Robert Prevost in the early stages of the Mass where he was consecrated as bishop. December 12, 2014. From the diocese of Chiclayo’s social media.]
Sadly, since there are no official public reports on this type of failed decisions made by the Catholic hierarchy it is almost impossible not to peg the appointment on who, ultimately, has the authority to accept or reject the appointment of any bishop: the sitting Pope who, at the time of Abanto Guzmán’s rise to stardom and his ultimate fall, was Benedict XVI.
Even worse is the fact that there is no “autopsy” of the appointment as such. All there is is a trail of newsclips. The most damning aspect of it all is how Abanto Guzmán devoted much of his life in 2012, pretty much as Sánchez Portillo does these days, to render himself a victim of a vengeful, scandal-prone media environment. Abanto Guzmán’s daughter’s mother was forced to become the very embodiment of the kind of fight many victims of clergy sexual abuse are forced to fight today.
For many months before Abanto Guzmán’s forced resignation, his former superiors, by then colleagues at CEP, did their best to deny, deflect and dismiss, and to render any news published on the issue as an attack on the Catholic Church.
It was only when the genetic analysis came out, upheld by a Peruvian court ruling, that the media operation set by the Archdiocese of Lima, CEP, and their friends and partners at ACI Prensa, at the time still under control of the now suppressed Sodalitium of Christian Life, ceased.
[Double standards regarding abuse, a harbinger of Leo XIV‘s papacy?]
So, even if there is some “muscle memory” this time around, a by-product of Abanto Guzmán’s scandal, the saga of the suppression of the Sodalitium and cases even more chaotic as the forced resignation of Ciro Quispe López back in 2025 (see the story linked above), the attempt to pretend that the Peruvian Church is in compliance with their own rules, is still there.
Pretending compliance
But even if one was willing to forget about García Camader’s role as a patron of sorts of Abanto Guzmán’s career 13 years ago, or to believe that he played no role in how Ciro Quispe López, a sexual athlete of sorts, became bishop in one of Peru’s most marginalized and remote dioceses, it is impossible to do so when dealing with his own role in handling the Sánchez Portillo case.
Rafael, an assumed identity, and the team supporting his claims followed the Church’s own playbook when dealing with his case. They got in touch with the diocese of Lurín, and as in so many cases all over Latin America, the diocese simply stalled.
There is a chance the curia in Lurín followed what used to the standard procedure all over the world during John Paul II’s pontificate: ignore it until it leaks. After all, that is what most dioceses in Latin America do, from Mexico to Argentina, why would it be different in this case?
Often, bishops and their judiciary vicars, bet on the victims growing tired of dealing with them. That has been the defining feature of other cases this series has documented in places as diverse as Izcalli, Mexico or Asunción, Paraguay, as the stories linked before and after this paragraph told at the time.
[Theology of impunity: Lessons from Paraguay]
Even in large relatively well-organized dioceses as Mexico City, after an initial rush of the monsignor in charge and his team, the promises of justice of the victims are replaced by the cold reality of institutional dismissal, as the story linked after this paragraph told a few weeks ago.
[Adult males abuse: the hardest story to tell]
There is chance García Camader’s team at Lurín were unable to assess how far Rafael was willing to go, and how the curia’s silence to the original report offered a base allowing Rafael to go all the way to Rome, as there was no official response from the bishop or his underlings in Lurín.
Rafael and those supporting his quest for justice used the technicalities of Francis’s reform, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, to turn a text-book local cover-up into a global crisis implicating a Pope fighting for his own right to criticize Trump’s excesses.
[PHOTO: Omar Sánchez Portillo, priest of the diocese of Lurín, Peru, hands over the keys of a car won by a young male in the diocesan raffle for funding of his diocese. Image published on April 28, 2026, by the diocese of Lurín’s social media.]
Even if it is hard to figure out what will be the end to this issue, for now, it is García Camader, the bishop of Lurín and president of CEP, who is now caught between his long document sympathy and symbiotic relationship with Sánchez Portillo, and the rules Pope Francis set in place.
It is impossible not to wonder at the contrast between Leo XIV aggressively reforming the U.S. hierarchy, while Peru still adheres to John Paul II’s protocol of playing victim while ignoring the actual victims of clergy sexual abuse.
That was on full display on Saturday May 2, when bishop García Camader used both his diocese’s and CEP’s social media to issue a statement where he claims full compliance with Vos Estis Lux Mundi, Pope Francis’s rather timid attempt at addressing clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, issued first in 2019 and then amended in 2023 .
The four-paragraph statement claims García Camader became aware of the accusations against Sánchez Portillo, after they were publicized over Peruvian media, despite the fact that the victim followed to the dot the Church’s internal protocol of contacting first the diocese. The statement is available, only in Spanish, as published over several Catholic Church profiles at Facebook.
What is worse, Peruvian clergy serving in the larger Lima Metropolitan area claim they became aware of accusations of abuse against Sánchez Portillo as early as 2023, when rumors begun affecting the performance of Catholic Relief Services in the diocese of Lurín, where he was a key player.
In this respect, the narrative of Omar Sánchez Portillo’s abuse is not merely about a single accusation, but about the strategic failure of the Peruvian Church hierarchy to act on information that was internally available long before the escalation to Rome. To be clear, as the Mexican cases in Izcalli and Mexico City, and the Paraguayan case already referenced, allegations about Sánchez Portillo’s predatory behavior were already “in the air” as early as 2023.
Rafael’s initial attempt to seek some solution through local canonical channels in Lurín, met with the “structural deadlock” of an institution where Sánchez Portillo is, up until today, a key power broker. One only needs to go back to the diocese’s official website, to find how it links to Sánchez Portillo’s Asociación de las Bienaventuranzas (Beatitudes Association), but there is no link in that website directing to the Lurín’s diocese URL.
[PHOTO: Screenshot of the website of the Catholic diocese of Lurín, Peru. In the third column it is possible to find the “button” linking with The Beatitudes Association. URL in the story.]
As the screen capture from the diocese’s URL before this paragraph shows, it is noticeable how the diocese links to CEP, to a local Catholic hospital and to Sánchez Portillo’s operation, while there is no reciprocity at the website available, at least up until Sunday May 3, 2026, here (content in Spanish).
On April 28, 2026, Sánchez Portillo left a marker of his decision to slow down his very active feed at one of his Facebook profiles, as he decided to mimic the Mexican Cristeros war cry: “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” (Long live Christ the King!) a tell-sign of him entering some kind of martyrdom because of his faith.
In any case, filing under Vos Estis allowed Rafael and the people supporting him to report not only the sexual abuse, but more significantly García Camader’s episcopal negligence. The move effectively puts García Camader on trial alongside the priest.
It is unclear what archbishop Paolo Rocco Gualtieri, the nuncio to Peru will do now. Will he acknowledge there were previous reports the diocese of Lurín dismissed? Will he try to pretend, as García Camader does in his May 2 statement that he has followed the official protocols to the dot? What will happen when and if Epicentro TV, the Peruvian media outlet supporting Rafael’s claims, publish evidence of their original attempts to report Sánchez Portillo at the Lurín curia?
Will the fact that the victim does not fit the preferred model of many Spanish-language media still talking about “pederasty” be used to dismiss the accusations against Sánchez Portillo?
Canonically, that is to say, as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the real issue, the so-called litis, is not the abuse as such, as in this case the victim was already an adult. It is Sánchez Portillo’s performing “acts contrary to the Sixth Commandment.”
In that regard, Rafael’s case in Lurín, Peru, is similar in every respect to Protasius, the Mexican case in the story linked after this paragraph. The only difference is that Rafael was at the time participating of a drug rehabilitation process and was under Sánchez Portillo’s care.
That is the best chance he has to at least fit the ever so elusive category of the “vulnerable adult,” but there is no guarantee Rome will acknowledge that, as there is no record of a consistent understanding of who “deserves” to be acknowledged as “vulnerable adults.”
[Adult males abuse: the hardest story to tell]
It must be noted that contrary to what the Gospel says about “giving alms,” Sánchez Portillo has perfected an elaborated routine of exploiting his alms giving. One of his Facebook profile pages, uses as openly as possible images of persons he seems to be intent on rescuing from the streets of Lurín and Lima at large.
You can find some of those pictures here or here and come to your own conclusions on whether or not he dismisses any right of the targets of his “alms giving,” when using their pictures to legitimize his own work.
Leo XIV stands at the crossroads to figure out if he wants to force some change in the Catholic Church of his adoptive country, where he became bishop, and Latin America at large or if he will let the local hierarchy in each country do as they please while profiting from Pope Prevost’s fame as the anti-Trump from the Global South.
This is more relevant as questions about the true suppression of the Sodalitium still haunt Peru. Yes, on paper, the religious structure appears as suppressed, but as José Luis Pérez Guadalupe, a former minister of the Interior, and University professor in Peru stresses in an interview with Peruvian broadcaster RPP, the structure is very much alive and active, especially in the days leading to the second round of the Presidential election.
For Robert Prevost, this is the time to prove that the issue is not his ability to resist or even debunk Trump’s policies, but how to solve a major issue of the Catholic Church at a global scale.
If he is capable of decisive action in the U.S. context, then failing to act with equal firmness in Peru or Latin America signals not prudence, but tolerance of abusive, predatory structures.
By the same token, the issue for Catholic bishops in Latin America is how long will they keep betting on Trump-like solutions for their countries to perpetuate the narrative of persecution and victimhood. Said narrative is harder to sustain when there is hardly any week without a sexual abuse scandal, from Mexico City to Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile.
[Hero, priest, and sexual predator: the story of Abbé Pierre]
More so, when one takes into consideration how Sánchez Portillo’s biography is almost a copycat, with the unavoidable differences, of other Catholic champions of social justice, Abbé Pierre in France, Felipe Berríos or Renato Poblete in Chile, to name only three of the most famous recent cases of sexual predators who were able to use their public personas as benefactors of humanity to perpetrate abuse.
[Berríos and Rupnik, the parallel lives of predator priests]
[Pope Leo XIV blessing a full size statue of Saint Rose of Lima in the Vatican Gardens. The piece is a donation from the Conference of Bishops. Published on January 31, 2026 by the diocese of Lurín’s social media.]
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
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A summary of this piece is available as audio after this paragraph.
Note on production: The text of this summary was written and edited solely by the author. The delivery of the audio summary was achieved using a high-quality, text-to-speech engine Microsoft Word for Web. The AI was used for voice generation only, not content creation.