Leo XIV’s bitter Lent season

Lent brought Leo XIV news about the first accountability report of a Polish diocese, six days before the first trial of a sitting bishop there for sexual abuse cover-up.

Leo XIV must follow bishop Andrzej Jeż’s trial. He has been charged for the cover up of two priests of the diocese of Tarnów, Poland. They abused at least 95 minors.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

The early days of the Lent season gave Pope Leo XIV several chances to rethink what he tries to achieve in what, if the current trends for healthcare hold, will be a papacy of at least two decades.

These days have been anything but easy. It is possible that, around Ash Wednesday, Leo XIV had a chance to read about a partial report recently published by the Polish diocese of Sosnowiec where there is an acknowledgment that abuse actually happens there as much as it happens in the rest of Europe, this side of the pond, and elsewhere in the Catholic world.

More so, as on February 18, six days after the report, news broke of a first ever in Poland: the formal accusation of Andrzej Jeż, the sitting bishop of the diocese of Tarnów. He has been formally accused of covering up, as he neglected his duty to report to the civil authorities, the sexual abuse of at least two priests who, according to media reports abused at least 95 underage boys and girls who were members of a choir.

A few hours before, the Pope Americano received, in his office at the Apostolic Palace, monsignor Fernando Ocáriz Braña, the 81-year-old Spaniard priest who is the moderator of Opus Dei, an order-like religious organization founded in Spain in the 20th century.

During the week, cleverly, Leo XIV commissioned Cardinal Pietro Parolin, his secretary of State, to let the White House know that he was going to hard pass on the chance to send one billion USD to Donald Trump for the “privilege” of having a seat at the so-called “Board of Peace,” a concoction where Nayib Bukele, Javier Milei and Santiago Peña, presidents of El Salvador, Argentina and Paraguay sit.

Then, Pope Prevost had a chance to meet again with the leaders of the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi, Marcial Maciel’s legacy to the Catholic Church.

It is hard to know if, over the week, Pope Leo had a chance to go over printed or virtual media from the Spanish-speaking world. If he did so, he would have been able to see how Rafael Zornoza Boy, the now emeritus bishop of Cádiz, Spain played, as many predators before, the role of the helpless victim of a perverse church betraying him because the church was willing to acknowledge him as an aggressor, as the story linked after this paragraph tells in the “A first ever section.”

Then, on Thursday 19, Leo XIV knew of a Society of Saint Pius X’s statement dismissing Cardinal Víctor Manuel Tucho Fernández’s offer to find a solution to the issue of the unauthorized consecration of new bishops by that organization.

Oddly enough, for the very first time in many years, the “order” of sorts founded by Marcel Lefebvre in the early 1970s, said something meaningful: they acknowledged there is no possible dialogue between Rome and an organization intent on dismissing Rome.

Finally, perhaps through some of the many friends Leo XIV made during his days in Peru, got the news about the appointment of a new President of his adoptive country. This appointment is relevant not only because the new Head of State, 83-year-old José María Balcázar, comes from the same openly Marxist party that former presidents Pedro Castillo and Dina Boluarte came from.

Putting aside the declared ideology of Balcázar’s, Castillo’s and Boluarte’s party, what should have concerned Pope Prevost is Balcázar’s long record of protecting sexual predators in his country.

A Polish laboratory?

Sosnowiec is now a suburb, almost undistinguishable from Katowice, a major city in the civil and religious history of Poland. Less than 5 miles or 8 kilometers separate downtown Sosnowiec from the limit with Katowice. It stands 38 miles or 60 kilometers west of Cracow, so it is hardly a rural or marginal diocese in the Polish far north, near the borders with Belarus or Lithuania.

The diocese was not chosen as a laboratory for its virtue, but for its notoriety. Before getting there, Artur Ważny was, for almost three years, an auxiliary of Tarnów, a diocese separated by a similar distance from Cracow but located to the east.

This means Ważny was intimately familiar with the ecclesiastical realities of both flanks of Southern Poland when he received his appointment from Robert Prevost, then prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, in 2024.

Before Ważny, Sosnowiec was the epicenter of a major clergy sexual scandal. In 2023, news emerged of a priest-hosted orgy that required police intervention when a participant overdosed, followed by the forced resignation of bishop Grzegorz Kaszak, now an emeritus at the “tender age” of 62, only two years older than Ważny.

This followed a 2023 murder-suicide between two clerics that shattered any remaining illusion of diocesan order. This is why Pope Francis’s appointment of Ważny’s, executed by then Cardinal Prevost, was critical. It was not about filling a vacancy; Ważny was a firefighter sent to perform damage control on a diocese that had become a liability for the Polish Church and the Vatican alike.

It was hardly a surprise to acknowledge what was already a matter of public national scandal. A report of what actually happened there and the decision to follow, up to a certain extent, the German model of setting up a relatively independent commission with permission to access the so-called “secret archive” of the diocese was not a reformist move but an attempt at recovering control of the diocese.

The full report, only in Polish is available here and Ważny published over his social media and the diocesan web page a brief statement about the report available in Polish here, with an automatic translation to English available here.

Sadly, the report coming from the Polish diocese of Sosnowiec is not an act of healing. On the one hand it is only a partial, preliminary report. On the other hand, there is chance it was published as such as a way for the Polish Church to help Jeż, the bishop of Tarnów, the former superior of Ważny, have a chance to weather the storm of the first ever trial of a sitting bishop in Poland for what seems to be a large-scale operation using a choir in Tarnów to systematically abuse minors.

Even if that was the case, the report from Sosnowiec stands as the first official departure from an era where the preeminent directive of the “martyr Catholic Church” of Poland was: denial, denial, and denial.

It is a document worth praise, not because of its writing. It is so badly written, probably rushed, that it even lacks a table of contents or an index, and all the data about the predators is so sanitized, that it would hardly help other victims to come forward to name their predators.

However, when taken together, the report from Sosnowiec and the trial at Tarnów turn Poland into a “laboratory” of sorts to figure out the possible future of Leo XIV’s papacy in Poland, elsewhere in Europe and in Latin America.

More when one takes into consideration that Poland hosted, from September 29 through October 3, 2025, the yearly general assembly of Tutela Minorum. Tutela is the body responsible for preventing clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the plenary was the first ever presided by French archbishop Thibault Verny.

It could be, in that regard, an example for other European countries where transparency has not been a priority (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Slovakia, Switzerland, Austria) and perhaps more so for Latin America, where even if the bishops remain unwilling to acknowledge the scale of the issue, changes in the laws and judiciary practice, force to wonder if there will be a major development in the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

The report marks an improvement from the secret and denialism of the John Paul II and Benedict XVI papacies, but it is still a bitter remedy for whoever expects some semblance of real progress in the ways the Catholic Church manages the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

Trial and report

As far as it is possible to know, Jeż’s trial is in its early stages and given its very novelty, there is a chance that it ends in disappointment, as there are issues such as the statute of limitations and the current age of the predators that even more victim-friendly systems have a hard time dealing with.

For the time being, it is hard to figure out what will happen with bishop Jeż as he has been head of the diocese only since 2012, although he was an auxiliary there starting in 2009.

That is why it is necessary to wait until the end of the process to see if the Polish judiciary uses this landmark trial as a springboard for a more proactive understanding of the law, or if, as it happened recently in Chile and Argentina, they adhere to a rigid understanding of the law.

That is also why it is necessary to keep the attention on the other issue, the first report on clergy sexual abuse to see if the Polish Church is willing to follow the French and German bishops’ lead, or if they will try to recycle the denialism of the John Paul II and Benedict XVI eras.

So far, the Sosnowiec report is more an exercise of institutional survival, one of defensive transparency, than a proactive take on how to deal with clergy sexual abuse at large.

Despite being a step in the right direction, it is still light-years from what has happened with the John Jay Report in the United States, the Royal Commission’s reports in Australia, the Sauvé Report in France or the reports coming from different German dioceses.

As much as the document represents a marginal improvement, it remains a hard to swallow pill for whoever wants to see real progress in how the Catholic Church deals with the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The most important sign of progress is that it acknowledges abuse as such, it does not turn to the retort of the “communist conspiracy” to deny it, even if the delivery is full of hurdles to frustrate any potential reader.

It is useful because it proves how the cases shaping the clergy sexual abuse crisis are nothing but reenactments of very similar scripts, obliterating any cultural difference between countries as dissimilar as Mexico and Poland can be.

The report acknowledgment of a rate of 3.2 percent of its total priests as aggressors could change in the future, as this is only a partial or preliminary report. However, by admitting that 19 out of 590 diocesan priests are predators, the report validates the global baseline of the Sauvé Report in a Polish diocese.

This data point is relevant as Los Angeles Press published back in 2023 a statistical exercise based upon the algorithm provided by the Sauvé Report. At the time, this series estimated the total number of current cases in Poland at a minimum of 28,360 and a maximum of 71,467 victims with a minimum number of predator males of 1,134, whether priests or religious brothers, as the story linked below proves.

Even if accepting the Sauve Report’s base could have been a tactical choice, and there are ways to do so, bishop Ważny aligns his diocese of Sosnowiec with international standards of accepted rot. It allows the institution to claim they are normal when compared to France or the United States, the countries for which there is reliable available data.

It does so in a way that puts pressure on the dioceses from which Sosnowiec was carved out as a new entity back in the 1990s. If Sosnowiec admits a 3.2 percent rate of predatory clergy, it would be very hard for the larger, more established “mother” dioceses of Krakow and Katowice, from which Sosnowiec was created, to claim abnormally lower numbers. Of course, it is still hard to imagine Krakow and Katowice following Sosnowiec’s lead, but there is a chance for that.

Striking parallelisms

The fact that Sosnowiec is a relatively “new” diocese, carved out from older dioceses offers the chance to find a striking parallelism with what Los Angeles Press has documented when going over very specific cases in Mexico, where predator priests are recruited by dioceses unwilling to vet them and expelled by dioceses unwilling to provide accurate background reports on priests or seminarians, as the story linked after this paragraph proved for the Mexican diocese of Izcalli.

The Polish report is an advancement as it proves how Sosnowiec, erected in 1992, did not grow its own crisis in isolation; it partially imported it. Of the 19 predators identified, 13 were inherited from the dioceses of Krakow and Czestochowa.

This is the same pattern found at the Mexican diocese of Izcalli in an Eastern European country and perhaps at a similar scale, although that is harder to estimate as there is no report from any Mexican diocese.

It is hard to know how frequent that phenomenon is because reports, even as partial, limited, and ill-designed as Sosnowiec’s are few and far between. What it is known by now is that when a new diocese is carved out from older dioceses, the elite in the established centers see a golden opportunity to offload their problematic clergy.

They use the hollow administrative structure of new dioceses such as Sosnowiec in the 1990s Poland or Izcalli in the 2010s Mexico as jurisdictional sponges. The larger, more established dioceses offloaded their toxic assets into a young presbyterium lacking a vetting infrastructure, historical memory, or legal strength to resist.

In that respect, Sosnowiec in the 1990s as Izcalli in the 2010s were not new mission territories; they were relief valves for the predatory overflow of the elite power centers. The mother dioceses cleaned their books by exporting their rot to a satellite they knew would be too weak to audit them and which was desperate to fill new vacancies.

Izcalli did it twice when it took first priests from the mother diocese of Cuautitlán de Romero Rubio and then when a former seminarian, ousted in opaque circumstances from the archdiocese of Acapulco found ordination and refuge.

As it happened in Sosnowiec and Izcalli, the diocese accepted a candidate who had already been kicked out of another institution for moral failings. Acapulco never issued a public, known, explicit report on Morseo Miramón Santiago. It was possible to track his record as a seminarian in Acapulco, as the story linked after this paragraph, sadly only available in Spanish, proved back in 2024. An automatic translation to English of that story is available here.

We know something similar happened several, at least 13 times in Sosnowiec because, as Izcalli, it was in desperate need to staff a new jurisdiction and plant flags on a map, consistently overriding any basic safety protocol. The hollowness of a new diocese, whether in Poland or in Mexico, creates a vacuum that sucks in known risks because warm bodies are prioritized over the protection of the faithful.

What emerges from Sosnowiec is not a Polish mistake; it is a procedural feature of the kind of risks religious organizations, Catholic or otherwise, are willing to take when expanding.

They treat rejected candidates or even leaders as valuable assets, effectively laundering their records through the creation of a new jurisdictional boundary, a variation of the so-called “geographic solution” as considered in previous installments of this series.

They do so, also, because the rejected candidate plays the part with enough candor to convince a willful superior and because, sadly, there is no mechanism forcing dioceses to report in black and white, officially, the reasons to reject a candidate, only vague generalizations about lack of character and similar platitudes.

Oddly enough, when asked off the record why they do so, diocesan officials claim it as an exercise in some distorted understanding of “Christian charity” towards a cleric in disgrace, even it they do so at the expense of putting their own faithful at risk.

One only needs to remember two names. In the English-speaking world there is, as one of many possible examples, that of John Geoghan, a now deceased former priest of the archdiocese of Boston who repeatedly found willful superiors desperate to have a priest to assign to a parish, a school or a chapel, regardless of their record of abuse.

In the Spanish-speaking world, Marcial Maciel, who despite being expelled from several Mexican seminaries had always one more bishop, who happened to be one of his uncles, to be accepted again as candidate to Holy Orders. The story linked after this paragraph focuses on that aspect of Geoghan’s, Maciel’s and another six predators’ biographies.

Global fame, local shame

Granted, there is no reason for a diocese in an English-speaking country to publish its reports in languages other than English, the same way no one should expect a Polish diocese to publish its documents in a language other than Polish.

Oddly enough the Polish diocese of Sosnowiec acknowledges the need to keep in touch with the affluent migrant communities of Polish origin in Britain, Canada, and the United States, so their YouTube channel has some of its masses dubbed to English, as this video of the homily of a Mass presided by bishop Ważny proves.

That is not something YouTube does on its own. The owner or community manager for the channel must set the YouTube preferences as to provide or not certain features, as this video explains. The issue is more relevant as that specific feature is not active for the press conference when the report was published.

Press conference for the report. Audio only in Polish; subtitles available from the YouTube Control Panel.

It proves how even a relatively small and “young” diocese such as Sosnowiec is a savvy communicator well aware of how to globalize its “brand,” keeping donors in the Greater London, Ontario and Illinois areas happy, while intentionally regionalizing its “shame.”

On top of that navigating the report is hard even for someone able to read Polish, as there is no index or table of contents. One would claim that it could be a mistake, or perhaps the very evidence of how bishop Ważny was more than willing to rush his report as to help his former boss, bishop Jeż.

By placing these hurdles, the report ensures that the cost of entry for a journalist or a victim is as high as possible, even if such journalist or survivor knows Polish. The authors of the report fulfill a mandate of (limited) transparency while keeping the data as difficult to access as possible.

Partial admission of guilt

On top of that, unlike the reports from state governments in the United States (Illinois or Pennsylvania) or the reports Los Angeles Press has published on Izcalli and other Mexican and Latin American dioceses, where names are provided as to facilitate victims coming forward, the data in the Polish report has been institutionally pasteurized as to make it hard for victims in Sosnowiec to come forward.

Sosnowiec mirrors what the Legion of Christ does with its reports on predator clergy in Mexico and Spain, where they do their best to benefit from the “privacy” laws in both countries. It is a partial admission of guilt, designed to be scanned, but never fully audited.

But even with all its failures, the report is a significant advance when looking at how the Polish bishops have spent the last three decades claiming to be a martyr Church protected by a saint of the 20th century.

There is a chance bishop Ważny is a prototype of transparency in the Leo XIV era. He could be a sensor-laden crash-test dummy sent into the wall of Polish clericalism to see if the structure can survive a partial admission of guilt. Its goal could be to test if acknowledging the responsibility of bishops from the Wojtyła era allows for some kind of (limited) reform.

By documenting the 13 imports from Krakow and Czestochowa, Ważny is burning the bridges to the old guard to buy himself enough oxygen to survive the scandal. He is taking the 3.2 percent hit now to prove that the elite dioceses were the ones who actually produced the rot. This turns the report into a document to force the old guard in the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Poland to acknowledge their own mistakes.

Sadly, the report also confirms that the expansion of religious organizations is often predicated on the offloading of problematic clergy and even lay leaders as the case of John Smyth in Anglican Church recently proved.

Justin Welby, the former archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Anglican Communion was well aware of Smyth’s predatory methods and yet, the appeal of converting souls in Africa was enough to keep him quiet about the potential risk for kids in countries South of the Mediterranean.

A previous installment of this series, available after this paragraph, devoted to the ongoing situation in the Anglican Church offers more details about Smyth and other cases in the Anglican Communion.

Religious hierarchies allow hollow jurisdictions lacking the required oversight required to offload predators. That is the very definition of the “geographic solution” Los Angeles Press has documented over and over.

And yet, the report from Sosnowiec is a landmark because it finally admits to this mechanic, even if it tries to hide the admission behind the absence of an index. It proves that the 3.2 percent is not an accident; it is the mathematical result of an institutional bypass that prioritizes a certain dubious notion of growth over human safety.

The jewel in the report issued by the diocese of Sosnowiec, despite all its limits, is to prove that the observed behavior in Izcalli, accepting former seminarians already expelled from a different diocese, is not a one off, it is part of the playbook followed by religious organizations.

Taken together, the data in the Sosnowiec report confirm that the mechanics documented through different methods in France and Mexico, in the Catholic and Anglican churches, are not anomalies but features of clergy governance across borders.

Post Data: The infinite complexities of charism

Leo XIV’s meetings with the leaders of both the Opus Dei and the Legion of Christ were different in tone and attitude. While the Opus Dei is in the middle of a process to find their new place in a Church that finally sees many of Josemaría Escrivá’s methods as sect-like behavior to say the least, the situation with the Legion of Christ is more complex.

As a story published recently as part of this series proved, Leo XIV seems to be unaware of how easy is for the former members, many of them victims of some type of abuse, at least spiritual of the Legion of Christ to find a cynical understanding of his words about the reform of that religious organization.

Not that Leo encourages the Legion of Christ to be as they used to be in the 1990s, but it is clear that he remains unwilling to clearly warn them about the risk of going back to their old ways, or rehabilitating Maciel, if not officially, at least in practice, going back to the delusional idea that he was devoted to doing good deeds despite the many abuses he perpetrated.

It is as if the Legion of Christ was unable to acknowledge what is happening these days with other known predators. As we know now, Jeffrey Epstein was very active in the philanthropy circles of the Aughts and 2010s. He was not out of the kindness of his heart, but as part of a carefully calculated strategy, a playbook of sorts, for which he was coached by Steve Bannon. He helped Noam Chomsky get his retirement monies back. Should the world forget about the many victims left behind by Epstein and his cabal?

That seems to be the jingle of choice at the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi and the social media groups where their victims share information seem to perceive the move from the new leadership to normalize Maciel and his way of doing “Christian charity,” as repugnant as the “civil philanthropy” practiced by Epstein.

More so, as Leo XIV’s final message does not include a single reference to the word abuse or any equivalent. It includes, instead nine references to the most elusive aspect of the Legion’s profile as a Catholic religious organization: its “charism,” something Maciel was never able to actually define and that all the General Chapters after his death have also been unable to put forward in a comprehensible manner.

Back in 2012, Rome asked the Legion to figure out what was their charism as this 2014 internal document of that order acknowledges on page 8. That same year, the Legion’s General Chapter published a Chapter’s statement dealing with the issue of the charism. A portion of that statement is available in English here. The full statement in Spanish is here.

The full text of the message Leo XIV read to the new leaders of the Legion of Christ is available here.

The politics of clergy colors

As far as the Opus Dei the meeting was of worth only to see Ocáriz Braña pretending to be a top member of the Catholic hierarchy when, in fact, he is nothing but a priest.

Ocáriz attended the meeting with Pope Leo XIV’s wearing all the adornments the Code of Canon Law allows a priest as he is to wear on such occasion. Not his fault. There is in the Catholic hierarchy of colors an issue.

Cardinals wear the so called “Cardinal Scarlet” or “Rosso Cardinale”, as the Roman tailors call it. This is a bright, vivid red, historically associated with the willingness to shed one’s blood for the faith. It is the color of the “Princes of the Church.”

Priests elevated to the honorary status of a monsignor such as Ocáriz Braña are allowed to wear the so-called “Monsignor Ruby” or “Paonazzo.” This is a deeper, more saturated red with slight blue undertones. While officially called “purple” in some old documents, in modern prelatial dress, it is a rich crimson/ruby, as the graphic immediately after this paragraph shows.

If one is obsessive enough to do it, there is chance to actually find the so-called HEX code, a universal standard to identify colors in its many shades. In such HEX Code, the Cardinal Scarlet or Cardinalis has a #C40233 value, described by the experts on colors and their seemingly infinite shades as a “true” bright red with high luminosity. The Monsignor Ruby, Amaranth or Paonazzo has a #951B3C, a “deeper, blood-wine red with a slight blue undertone.”

The untrained eye will have a hard time figuring out if Ocáriz Braña was pretending to be a Cardinal, which he is not, or accepting the true scale of his status as a priest with a bombastic title.

Unlike the message to the new leaders of the Legion of Christ, the second in less than a month, there was no message for the Opus Dei. Only the official reminder in the Vatican Bollettino that Ocáriz Braña is only a monsignor and only the moderator, no longer the prelate, as the Opus Dei communications office insists when writing about their leader.

For the time being, any semblance of reform in both organizations, the Legion of Christ and the Opus Dei, remains uncertain, probably in the expectation of what Leo XIV will do or no with an entity to the right of both the Legion of the Opus, the so-called Society of Saint Pius X.

Does God only understand Latin?

The other major Lent resolution Leo XIV will have to figure out is what to do with the religious organization founded in the late 1960s by French bishop Marcel Lefebvre. He was notorious in France for his willingness to bless the Vichy regime, the entity Germany created in Southern France as a puppet regime of Berlin during the second World War.

Lefebvre was a priest during the war. It would be only in 1947 when Pius XII appointed him as bishop in what is now Senegal, at the time a colony in the French Empire.

Although Lefebvre had a chance to attend the Second Vatican Council (1962-5), as soon as it ended he became one of its fiercest critics. More so when Pope Paul VI changed not only or mainly the way the Catholic Mass was celebrated but especially the ritual for the Good Friday.

What irritated Lefebvre and many of his followers the most was Paul VI’s decision to remove the rather contradictory “prayer for the conversion of the Jews” from the Good Friday ritual.

In several installments of this series there are references to Lefebvre and his toxic legacy in the Catholic Church. The most relevant to understand the sources of the new confrontation between Lefebvre’s disciples and successors at the SSPX and Leo XIV appears before this paragraph, especially the section titled “Rebel priests and the Latin mass.”

Although not directly related to that issue, there is more valuable information in the installment linked after this paragraph, especially the section titled “A war on ‘Modernism’” dealing with the role of Pius X’s legacy in the Catholic Church’s many current troubles.

What matters at this point is that the SSPX itself acknowledges that there is no possible dialogue with Rome. Will that be enough for Rome to do, again, what John Paul II already did with Lefebvre? It is hard to know. After Lefebvre’s death in 1991, John Paul II and Benedict XVI spent too much time and money trying to bring the SSPX back to the fold.

Benedict XVI had a minor win of sorts when he was able to convince a small number of members of that “order” to cross the Rubicon and to create the Society of Saint Peter, a group also committed to stick to the old ways of celebrating the Mass which, in any case, are not half as old as Lefebvre and his disciples have being saying for the last 50 years or so, as the Mass that Paul VI decided to change had only be designed as such in the 16th century, during the chaotic Council of Trent.

His pyrrhic victory came at the expense of accepting whatever the SSPX requested from him to no avail as, in the end, SSPX decided to remain in some sort of exile. Rome’s goodwill continued with Francis. Even before his 2013 election as Pope, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as president of the Argentine Conference of Bishops and archbishop of Buenos Aires, in 2011, acknowledged the SSPX as a legitimate Catholic entity for both the purposes of their canonical registration and the one they must have with the Argentine authorities, helping them to access visas as religious ministers.

Already as Pope, Francis granted them special permits to let them marry Catholic couples legitimately, and to perform other Catholic rituals.

Nothing was ever enough. The only remaining question is what the U.S. Catholic far-right, with Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke and bishop Robert Barron will do at this point. Leo XIV was gracious enough to allow Burke an exception to go back to Saint Peter’s Basilica main, pontifical altar, to celebrate Mass in the old ritual.

Many “liberals” in the Catholic Church saw his gesture as a betrayal of Francis’s legacy, as Burke played a key role in the relentless attack mounted by Steve Bannon and the U.S. and European far-right.

What else would Leo XIV do to appease the SSPX? The only thing that would do for them is Leo XIV abrogating each and every one of the documents issued by the Second Vatican Council or those directly derived from it, especially but not limited to the way Mass is celebrated, and most certainly the changes introduced by both John XXIII and Paul VI to the Good Friday’s rituals (there is no Mass on that day) to perpetuate anti-Semitism as the official doctrinal position of the Catholic Church.

The issue matters not only because of the internal politics of the Catholic Church, also because of the number of abuses happening in parishes, schools and seminaries managed by the SSPX where victims face a harsher reality than victims of parishes or dioceses loyal to Rome, as this organization dismisses—as proven by their response to Cardinal Fernández—Rome’s authority, leaving the victims with no recourse other than the order itself.

In France, their cradle, there is a clear record of the kind of abuses happening there, as the story linked after this paragraph proves in the “Catholic heartland” section.

Andean reveries

Finally, as if Robert Prevost Martínez, as now Pope Leo XIV used to be called when he acquired the Peruvian citizenship, had not enough bitterness in his plate, his adoptive country decided to appoint a known defender of convicted sexual predators as President.

Even if one is willing to put aside the comedy of errors that Peruvian politics has been for the last decade or so, it is impossible to miss on the fact of how El Comercio, one of Peru main legacy newspapers of record, goes back over the history of José María Balcázar shielding sexual predators.

Peruvian journalists revisited his controversial tenure as a congressman and judge, pointing out how Balcázar has consistently used his platform to minimize the gravity of sexual violence, at one point infamously suggesting that “sexual relations” between adults and minors could be consensual if “informed.”

This rhetoric has resurfaced as a primary point of contention, with civil society groups arguing that his presidency poses a direct threat to the legal protections of vulnerable populations in Peru.

The Peruvian press also publishes stories about how Balcázar’s defensive strategy often mirrors the “institutional denial” seen in both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Peru and elsewhere. It centers on attacking the credibility of victims and framing probes as politically motivated persecutions, as the previous installment of this series proved for the case of Chilean predator Felipe Berríos, available after this paragraph.

El Comercio specifically noted that despite the Marxist-Leninist orientation of his party, Balcázar has found common ground with conservative religious elements when it comes to blocking reforms that would increase oversight of sexual abuse cases.

This “unholy alliance,” one of many in Peru’s convoluted polity, has sparked intense debate in Lima, as his long record of procedural interference and public dismissals of predatory behavior now moves from the halls of the legislature to the highest office in the country. More so as Rafael López Aliaga, the mayor of Lima and a member of the highest rank of Opus Dei blamed Keiko Fujimori for making Balcázar appointment possible.

And to be sure, nothing happens in the Peruvian congress without Fujimori’s acquiescence. What López Aliaga dismisses is how Fujimori has been using Castillo’s party to discredit any other party but hers as a viable option to run Peru.

In that respect, Leo XIV better be careful with whatever announcement made about a potential pastoral travel to his adoptive nation, perhaps more so that when he decided to avoid going back, at least for the time being, to the United States, as it happened to Francis who was unable to ever go back to Argentina.

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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.