WASHINGTON (DC)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
January 27, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
As the Conference of Catholic Bishops tries to raise his voice against Trump’s policies, their record on abuse comes to bite them back.
J.D. Vance attacked a statement from the U.S. Catholic bishops as Trump did it with Episcopal bishop Budde’s plea.
Vatican News confirms the news about Pope Francis sending Peruvian Cardinal Cipriani into “exile” as “punishment” for the sexual abuse of a minor.
The Spanish-speaking world has been on alert since Monday when Donald Trump went back to the White House. With the relative exception of Spain, Uruguay, and Puerto Rico, the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries are all at some risk because of Trump’s migration or trade policies.
To make matters worse, Trump’s surrogates are using the clergy sexual abuse crisis, the deep distrust that it has created even among the most faithful Roman Catholics, to their benefit.
On Sunday morning, as the rituals of the U.S. political life dictate, we were witnesses of Vice President J. D. Vance’s interview with CBS’ Face the Nation. Around the ten-minute mark, Margaret Brennan, the newscast’s host, asked Trump’s VP about the change in policy that allows raids to happen at places or worship, hospitals, and schools.
Following Trump’s practice of rendering himself as the offended party, Vance did that and went to attack the leaders of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), sowing the seeds of distrust in them about the reasons to criticize Trump’s change in policies.
The US bishops’ critique was only to a specific aspect of Trump’s policies. As it has been Archbishop Timothy Broglio’s practice, the Conference’s chair praised Trump for his discriminatory gender policies, as this sentence shows: “other provisions in the Executive Orders can be seen in a more positive light, such as recognizing the truth about each human person as male or female.”
But as Trump’s intolerance against the Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, Mariann Budde proved, there is no room for disagreement with whatever Trump wants to enact, so Vance felt the need to render himself as offended by archbishop Broglio’s statement when dealing with migrants:
Some provisions contained in the Executive Orders, such as those focused on the treatment of immigrants and refugees, foreign aid, expansion of the death penalty, and the environment, are deeply troubling and will have negative consequences.
The full statement of the Catholic Conference of Bishops is available here.
Far from acknowledging the role that the Catholic and other churches in the United States play in providing services for the U.S. federal government, in full conspiracy theory mode, Vance raised “questions” about the role of that Church in the “trafficking of minors.”
That has been one of the U.S. far-right favorite conspiracy theories as to justify neglecting any chance of relief to asylum seekers or forcing countries as El Salvador, to accept people from other countries seeking refuge, despite the many challenges El Salvador itself confronts.
That conspiracy theory is also at the core of the story in Sound of Freedom, a movie produced by one of Trump’s Mexican surrogates, Eduardo Verástegui.
Former victims of trafficking and their advocates have criticized the movie lacking substance and evidence of its claims, but also because of the many holes in the personal story of Tim Ballard, the real-life protagonist that allegedly portrays.
Ballard, a former law-enforcement agent in the U.S. government has been involved in a series of disputes that it would require a book to barely cover the many accusations launched against him for misrepresenting his own role as savior of trafficked children, and one more to deal with his complex relationship with leaders of the Utah-based e Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the so-called Mormon Church.
British newspaper The Independent went deep into how much Sound of Freedom misrepresents Ballard’s role as a law-enforcement agent in the United States, while U.S.-based news outlet Vice and others have shown how Ballard’s and Verástegui’s fans attack people, even former victims of trafficking, unwilling to buy into Sound of Freedom’s idea of accuracy.
Adam Herberts, at Fox News Utah, has gone deep into documenting Ballard’s conflicting relationship with leaders of the Latter-day Saints Church and public officials there, as the thread after this paragraph, posted back in 2023, shows.
In that respect, Ballard’s and Verástegui’s arguments to justify neglecting asylum to people seeking that kind of help at the U.S. border’s “ports of entry” are weak to say the least, not to mention the many questions about Verástegui’s attempt to force a Fascist-like type of relationship between religion and politics in Mexico, that leads him to attack bishops willing to participate in round tables in Catholic colleges in Mexico City with people who Verástegui, his sponsors, and allies consider unworthy.
Vance’s line of attack on the Catholic Church in the United States, implying that somehow was profiting from the assistance to refugees, asylum seekers, and more broadly migrants, started back on Thursday, when the bishop of El Paso, Mark Seitz, a key figure in the Catholic Church response to the crisis in the U.S.-Mexico border, criticized the then newly announced change in policy.
Elon Musk amplified similar ideas from his own account at X.
There, he joins the “party” attacking the Catholic Church for receiving a payment for the services it has been providing under the current U.S. laws.
Boosted by his own algorithm, social media accounts linked to Libertarianism, to the so-called Techno-Bros, and the most radical brands of Catholicism in the United States, the ones going as far as to deny the legitimacy of Pope Francis’s election back in 2013, went into attack mode, pointing out to the millions of U.S. dollars that Catholic Charities has been receiving as payment for its services to the U.S. government over the last few years.
As far as the radical brands of Catholicism, the attack had at least two leaders on X. On the one hand, there was the Complicit Clergy account. That account compared Mark Seitz, the Catholic bishop of El Paso to a cartel leader at the helm of an operation using clandestine tunnels between that city in Texas and Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, as the message posted after this paragraph shows.
Although Complicit Clergy would seem to imply that whoever operates that account is in some sort of crusade to criticize the leaders of the Catholic Church that would be misleading.
Even if the account sometimes criticizes bishops and priests somehow involved in the clergy sexual abuse crisis, it is very selective to do so. It usually defends clergy linked formally or informally with the most conservative brands of Catholicism, even when church, civil or penal courts have found them guilty.
They provide no information as to who operate the account, and they amplify content from the most radical accounts supporting whatever Trump is willing to do, regardless of the potential outcomes of such measures.
Another leader of the attack on bishop Seitz was the X account of the so-called Lepanto Institute, an entity calling itself Catholic, spreading all kinds of conspiracy theories about Pope Francis.
The entity borrows its name from the Battle of Lepanto, a Greek port. Although at its time (1571) it was the largest maritime battle ever, it had littler or no effect on the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, but it is somehow a common reference in Roman Catholic Spanish-speaking circles, because it was the battle where Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of Don Quixote, a Spanish-language foundational master piece, lost one of his hands fighting there.
Also, because it is the origin of the current feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, and because a Spanish captain had a copy of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that he credited with the victory that day.
At the time, the then Pope and European Roman Catholic kings commissioned paintings, poems, and other forms of art to celebrate their victory as some sort of cataclysmic event, marking a before and after in the history of Europe, as the painting displayed after this paragraph pretends to prove although, again, it had no ultimate effect in preventing most of Greece from being annexed to the then rising Ottoman Empire.
In that sense, the members of the Lepanto Institute and other entities with similar profiles and ideas, look at themselves as some sort of last line of defense of Catholicism and Western culture. That is why they sustain a systematic, relentless attack on Jorge Mario Bergoglio who they portray as an enemy of his own Church and Western civilization.
As Vance did on CBS, the Lepanto Institute accounts in social media came short of openly attacking the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. They left that job to a small army of recently created accounts at X, some of them sporting what seem to be randomly generated numbers instead of names, lacking any picture or name.
Whoever controls those accounts saw no need to keep it civil. Some of them went into openly insulting bishop Seitz in either English or Spanish, and to add injury to the insults, they were linking what is happening these days at the US-Mexico border with the issue the Catholic Church seems to be unable to deal with: the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
That line of attack on the Catholic Church had been already hinted by Trump’s new migration czar, Tom Homan, who told Newsmax back on January 24th, that Pope Francis should not criticize the U.S.’ policy choices, but “stick to fixing the Catholic Church.”
Vatican walls
Homan called himself a “lifelong Catholic” and yet he talked about a wall built back in the Middle Ages that now is part of the entrance to the Vatican Museums (see the image above), as if Francis had ordered its construction during his tenure as Pope, while dismissing the fact that said wall covers only a fraction of an already small border with Italy.
Homan also dismissed there is no wall separating the City of Rome from the Vatican in the main access to Saint Peter’s Square and Basilica, as the image after this paragraph shows.
On Sunday afternoon, The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a new statement saying the funds they have received from the government of their country, “are not sufficient to cover the entire cost of these programs. Nonetheless, this remains a work of mercy and ministry of the Church.”
Their most recent statement on the issue is available here.
Sadly enough, the bishops’ new statement lacked the support of an Excel or a PDF file as to provide details of how much money they received and how much money they spend on each migrant or in the overall program in agreement with the U.S. government. That would have been helpful for the Church’s own cause.
Putting aside the issues with Vance’s, Musk’s, and Homan’s line of attack on Francis is that they both ignited a series of attacks on the Catholic leaders in the United States and elsewhere rendering them as complicit in sexual abuse crimes.
And as far-fetched as their claims are, it is impossible to dismiss them when one takes into consideration that, over the weekend, as these issues have been appearing in TV, computer, and phone screens all over the world, there are news confirming the role of the Catholic Church in sexual abuse crimes.
It is not as if Vance, Musk, or Homan support their attacks on bishop Seitz and the Catholic Church with evidence. Quite the opposite. But even if the is no evidence of malfeasance on Seitz’s, there is evidence of many clergy sexual abuse crimes elsewhere and how, instead of going deep into the roots of the crisis, Pope Francis has been trying a “friendly” approach with the predators that, in the end, backfires against him and his Church.
Lima-Madrid-Rome Axis
That is the takeaway of a story that has been developing almost at the same time as the migration crisis from Lima, the capital of Peru, to Madrid, and to Rome. On Saturday, Spaniard newspaper El País published a story about the reasons behind the sudden resignation back in 2019 of Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne.
According to El País’ piece, the Peruvian Cardinal and former archbishop of Lima, the oldest city in South America and his country’s capital, was forced out to retire and exile himself out of Peru after being accused of sexually molesting an underage boy whose mother used to bring to him when the now 58-year-old was a kid.
The news coming from El País’ newsroom in Madrid shocked few in Lima, as there have been frequent informal accusations of that kind of behavior against Cipriani over the last 20 years, on top of the accusations raised against him for his support, formal and informal, for the leaders of the Sodalitium of Christian Life.
Main problem is that the law in Peru and other Latin American countries punishes the victims willing to step up and talk about their experiences, as the many cases of the Sodalitium, prove.
Back in July 2021, Jaime Bayly, a Peruvian novelist. went as far as to use a column he publishes on a weekly basis to tell a “fictional” story about a Peruvian Cardinal accused, as Cipriani has been, of sexually molesting underage boys.
He called the fictional character “Cardinal Cienfuegos,” but all the details now revealed by the Spaniard newspaper El País are already in Bayly’s original piece, available here only in Spanish at Diario 21.
In that regard, Pope Francis’s attitude towards Cipriani comes back to bite him back because there was no reason to protect Cipriani while dismissing Cipriani’s victims’ pain and grief.
Oddly enough, on Sunday, even Vatican News joined the choir of global media providing details of how Cipriani was unwilling to observe the terms issued by Pope Francis. While I write these lines on Sunday afternoon, on the Spanish (available here) and Italian editions (available here) of Vatican News there are stories of how the Vatican confirms that Cipriani was the subject of some kind of disciplinary measure from Pope Francis. No such story is available at the English-speaking section of that website.
As far as it is possible to tell, in going back to Peru to receive prizes from the hands of the Mayor of Lima, his country’s capital, and to roam the rooms of power, where he used to be a dealmaker, Cipriani broke the terms of his “punishment.”
Slap on the wrist
Main problem is that even if the news published in Madrid prove Cipriani’s guilt as a predator, it also proves that his original “punishment” was nothing but a mild reprimand, something as irrelevant, that Cipriani was confident enough to dismiss by going back to Lima.
The piece published by El País talks about other Opus Dei bishop who tried to help Cipriani deny any wrongdoing, but it does not identify who is that other bishop. As far as it is possible to tell, the other Peruvian bishop, who is also a member of the Opus Dei, would be Juan Antonio Gómez Ugarte who is now also an emeritus bishop.
They were following, after all, the standard operating procedure of denying, then harassing the victims, then trying to force them to keep quiet, to grow tired of dealing with the maze of the local police precincts, the courts, on top of the opacity of the Church’s own procedures.
Somehow Cipriani still found the strength to challenge El País’ piece, issuing a statement where he goes back into prince mode using a seal, on top of his signature, when in strict sense, he has no formal duties at this point in his life. What is worse, he is still using the old official letterhead as if he was still in charge of the Archdiocese of Lima, unwilling to at least change it to reflect his current condition as emeritus.
That attitude results in the attacks one sees now from Vance, Musk, and Homan. As relevant as it could be the voice of the Catholic bishops in the United States to prevent any more abuses against the migrants living without proper documents in that country, it would be absurd to pretend that their Church has at this point the moral authority to call out those abuses.
For as long as the Roman Catholic hierarchy keeps engaging in the kind of horse trading that Pope Francis himself did to protect Cardinal Cipriani, they will be open to the kind of attacks launched over this weekend by Vance, Musk, Homan, and the entities using the Catholic brand to support Trump’s “deeply disturbing” policies against migrants, asylum, and refugee seekers and, overall, against non-white people in the United States.
More so when one takes into consideration the many other mistakes made not only and perhaps not mainly by Pope Francis in Peru and other countries affected by the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
Dangerous predators
It is clear that this pattern goes back to John Paul II and the stars of his curia, Joseph Ratzinger, and Angelo Sodano. They, despite all the warnings from people in Mexico, the United States, Chile, Peru, and many other countries back in the 1990s, decided to let dangerous predators roam sacristies and convents.
Francis himself, in his earlier life as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, tried to call out one of those predators when dealing with Carlos Miguel Buela, the founder of the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word.
Back in 1999, when Bergoglio was archbishop of Buenos Aires and vice president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Argentina, he and almost all the other Argentine bishops asked then Pope John Paul II to suppress that religious order.
The only Argentine bishop willing to support Buela was the then archbishop of La Plata, Héctor Rubén Aguer, a cleric who is not formally a member of the Opus Dei, but who is as close as possible to that organization in his home country.
It would be impossible to go into the details of John Paul II’s decision to dismiss the Argentine bishops’ request to put an end to the abuses at the Institute of the Incarnate Word, want is relevant is that, for whatever reason, the leaders of the Catholic Church always find a reason to be timid when confronting predators.
Now, as the attacks from Vance, Musk, and Homan, prove that is coming to bite them back, while maiming their ability to protect the people who really need them, as the migrants the U.S. government is about to deport, who are now alone with no support or help for them
And the issue is not only relevant when thinking about the role of the Catholic Church in the United States. Some of the social media accounts amplifying Vance’s, Musk’s, and Homan’s attacks operate in both English and Spanish, targeting people in Ciudad Juárez where the response to the clergy sexual abuse crisis has not been as diligent as bishop Seitz’s has been as the story above proves.
More so, when one takes into consideration that, on top of all the other issues affecting the Mexican Catholic Church, the spokesperson of the Mexican diocese of Ciudad Juárez endorses and promotes from his social media accounts Trump’s relentless attacks on Latino populations in the United States, as the story, available below only in Spanish, proves.