The allegations surrounding Robert Prevost’s handling of clerical abuse complaints in Chiclayo have never justified the easy accusation that the future Pope deliberately protected abusers. Nor, however, can the equally easy defence that everything was done properly now be sustained without qualification. A later Church-appointed investigator has been recorded describing the earlier inquiry as gravely deficient; his reading of Prevost’s own precautionary decree appears to contradict what the Diocese of Chiclayo subsequently told the public; one accused priest has died without any publicly demonstrated canonical investigation of the allegation against him; and another left the clerical state without the allegations receiving a canonical judgement on their merits. Leo XIV has repeatedly called for transparency in abuse cases. Chiclayo is now a test of that principle.
Nuntiatoria first examined the Chiclayo allegations in August 2025, when Ana María Quispe Díaz publicly challenged the account given by the Diocese of Chiclayo concerning complaints which she and two other women had brought against diocesan priests. We returned to the case when Fr Eleuterio Vásquez González, known locally as “Lute”, was granted a dispensation from the clerical state; again when serious questions arose about the handling of the canonical proceedings; and in July this year when the decisive issue became impossible to avoid: if the preliminary investigation which the diocese says was conducted under ✠Robert Prevost in 2022 actually happened according to law, where are the canonical acts which demonstrate it?¹
That question has become more serious, not less. Nothing published since then establishes that Robert Prevost deliberately concealed sexual abuse or knowingly sought to protect an abuser. It would be irresponsible to turn procedural questions into proof of corrupt motive. Quispe herself has described aspects of her first contact with Prevost in terms inconsistent with the crudest version of a cover-up: she says that when she spoke to him in 2020 he listened to her, expressed sorrow and encouraged recourse to the authorities. Prevost’s documented record in the entirely separate Sodalitium Christianae Vitae scandal also includes survivors who say that he listened when others would not, assisted them and helped bring their concerns before Rome.²
That evidence deserves its full weight. A serious investigation cannot begin with the conclusion that every ambiguity proves guilt. Neither, however, may Catholic loyalty begin with the opposite conclusion that the future Pope must therefore have handled every case correctly. The evidence now available suggests a more uncomfortable possibility: a bishop capable of acting decisively for victims in one setting may nevertheless have presided over a seriously inadequate canonical response in another. Human conduct is rarely tidy enough to furnish either hagiography or prosecution with everything it wants.
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