The once-powerful archbishop of Lima, Peru, and the first-ever cardinal of Opus Dei acknowledged Saturday that the Vatican had imposed sanctions on him in 2019 following an allegation of sexual abuse, but he denied wrongdoing. Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, 81, wrote a response after Spain's El País newspaper detailed the allegations against him in its latest installment exposing cases of clergy sexual abuse in the Spanish-speaking Catholic Church. Cipriani called the allegations "completely false," the AP reports. "I haven't committed any crime, nor have I sexually abused anyone in 1983, neither before nor after," Cipriani said in the letter provided by Opus Dei's Rome office.
The sanctions limited "my priestly ministry" and asked Cipriani to live outside Peru, he said. Cipriani, who led the Peruvian church for two decades before his retirement in 2019, was the first cardinal of Opus Dei, the conservative movement that was founded by the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá in 1928 and has more than 90,000 members in 70 countries. The group includes priests, celibate laypeople as well as laymen and women with secular jobs and families who strive to "sanctify ordinary life." The allegations against Cipriani add to the upheaval in the Peruvian church following confirmation this week that Pope Francis had decided to dissolve the influential Peruvian-based movement Sodalitium Christianae Vitae.
After years of attempts at reform, Francis acted after a Vatican investigation uncovered sexual abuse by its founder, financial mismanagement by its leaders, and spiritual abuse by its top members. Cipriani was newly in charge of the Peruvian church when the first allegations against Sodalitium aired publicly in 2000 in the magazine Gente by former member José Enrique Escardó. Victims first presented formal accusations in 2011 to the church. Cipriani insisted that he handled the allegations properly, but it wasn't until journalists Pedro Salinas and Paola Ugaz exposed the practices of Sodalitium in their 2015 book Half Monks, Half Soldiers that the case began to move. Ten years later, 25 years after he first went public, Escardó met with the pope on Friday. "I feel very, very good, listened to," he told the AP on Saturday outside St. Peter's Square. "I think I also let go of a heavy weight, which is the voice of so many victims."
(More
Catholic Church stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
