REVEALED: How the People's Pope shielded sexual predators in the clergy – including one priest accused of violently raping nuns

Daily Mail​

03-05-2025

When the world's cardinals met in Rome last Monday for the first of their crucial pre-conclave discussions, they raised 'the issue of clerical abuse', according to a Vatican spokesman.
The cardinals are forbidden to reveal anything that was said.
But behind closed doors, the preparations for the conclave – which starts on Wednesday – are already mired in scandal.
Aside from doubts about the true age of Philippe Ouedraogo, a cardinal from Burkina Faso whom some claim is 80, meaning he's too old to vote, and concerns about the presence of the Peruvian cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, who faces sexual abuse allegations (which he denies), several cardinals have torn into the legacy of the late Pope Francis.
'We have listened to many complaints against Francis's papacy in these days', one unnamed cardinal told America Magazine, a Jesuit publication.
In any case, we can be certain that Monday's debate was haunted by a series of jaw-dropping scandals whose details are unknown to the vast majority of the 400,000 Catholics who attended Pope Francis's funeral a week ago.
If they had known, the crowds would have been much smaller.
The 'people's Pope' was elected in 2013 on a promise to hold the Church accountable for clerical sex abuse. And it's true that he did establish new rules designed to punish bishops found guilty. But the first Argentinian pontiff did not practise what he preached. The darkest mystery of Francis's 12-year reign was his persistent habit of shielding credibly accused and even convicted sexual predators from justice
For the common denominator of these scandals – whose victims included 20 Slovenian nuns who claim to have been raped, Argentinian seminarians grotesquely assaulted by their bishop and a Belgian teenager subjected to incestuous assault by his uncle, a bishop – is that Francis went to bizarre lengths either to conceal or excuse these crimes.
The 'people's Pope' was elected in 2013 on a promise to hold the Church accountable for clerical sex abuse.
And it's true that he did establish new rules designed to punish bishops found guilty.
But the first Argentinian pontiff did not practise what he preached.
The darkest mystery of Francis's 12-year reign was his persistent habit of shielding credibly accused and even convicted sexual predators from justice.
The Pope enjoys supreme authority over the Catholic Church.
He can twist or ignore canon law, which is supposed to punish sex offenders, and the Vatican state's criminal law, without being challenged.
That is precisely what he did, again and again.
Indeed, his sinister modus operandi predated his election: as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he tried to keep a priest who abused homeless boys out of jail.
As Pope, he was questioned about it and told a bare-faced lie in front of the cameras.
Francis's long record of protecting convicted and suspected predators should have been the biggest scandal to face the church in decades if not centuries.
Why, then, did it not dominate headlines around the world?
The answer is that, although some individual journalists reported the heartbreaking testimonies of the victims, they did not draw the necessary connections between cases separated by thousands of miles and, in some cases, several decades.
Meanwhile, members of the Vatican Press corps threw up a smokescreen to protect a Pope whose Left-wing agenda they shared.
Now, finally, it is time for an overview of Francis's support for some clerics who have faced appalling allegations – specifically three self-styled 'men of God': Julio Grassi, Marko Rupnik and Gustavo Zanchetta.
'A descent into hell' was how 'Anna', a 58-year-old former Italian nun, described the nine years of abuse she claimed to have endured at the hands of Fr Marko Rupnik, a Slovenian Jesuit priest – and friend of Pope Francis – who became the world's most successful mosaic artist.
In December 2022, Anna spoke to the Italian newspaper Domani, after his mosaics were installed in more than 200 Catholic holy places, including the basilicas of Lourdes and Fatima, the St John Paul II national shrine in Washington DC and a chapel in the Vatican.
Rupnik's art struck many Catholics as creepy. Jesus, Mary and the saints were depicted with huge empty black eyes.
But Church authorities poured hundreds of millions of pounds into commissions. Rupnik was untouchable.
His alleged victims, however, were not. In the 1980s he founded an order of religious sisters in Slovenia.
Anna joined at 21, attracted by his 'charisma' and 'sensitivity in identifying people's weaknesses'.
He would touch her while he was explaining his art. Then, she says, 'he kissed me lightly on the mouth, telling me that this was how he kissed the altar where he celebrated the Eucharist'.
According to Anna, Rupnik would use theological language while molesting her. Soon after she took her religious vows, she said, he attacked her so violently she lost her virginity.
She said Rupnik abused 20 nuns, one of whom broke her arm trying to resist him.
Anna spoke out in 2022 because the Vatican, although advised by the Jesuit order that the claims were credible, refused to bring any charges under canon law against Rupnik.
In 2019 the priest was caught absolving a female victim in the confessional after a sexual encounter with her – a crime that earned him automatic excommunication when it came to light.
Incredibly, while his excommunication was being processed, the Pope allowed him to deliver spiritual reflections to Vatican officials. And when the penalty was imposed, Francis mysteriously lifted it within weeks.
In 2023, news leaked that Rupnik – by now expelled from the Jesuits – was returning to ministry in Slovenia as a priest in good standing.
The public reaction was so ferocious the Pope finally agreed to a trial. But nothing happened.
In 2024 two former nuns from Rupnik's community, Mirjiam Kovac and Gloria Branciani, held a press conference. Kovac spoke of 'young girls' subjected to sadistic abuse.
Branciani described being forced into a sexual threesome modelled on the Holy Trinity and how this would involve having to 'drink his semen from a chalice at dinner'.
In another interview, Branciani said when Rupnik 'threw himself on me', she protested: 'But I could get pregnant.'
The priest's chilling reply? 'You can always have an abortion.'
She walked into the woods intending to kill herself, but decided 'the Lord did not want me to die'. Still Francis did nothing.
The prelate in charge of the trial, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, explained that 'worse cases' took priority.
Meanwhile the Vatican communications office repeatedly promoted Rupnik's art online.
A pattern emerged, even if Francis's friends in the media refused to report it. When it came to protecting his abuser allies from justice – however diabolical the crime – the late Pope was a repeat offender.
The warning signs appeared from the moment Jorge Mario Bergoglio [Francis's real name] appeared on the balcony of St Peter's in 2013.
He was accompanied by the disgraced former Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, the late Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who was secretly recorded in 2010 telling a young man to shut up about the fact that he had been sexually abused by his uncle, Bishop Roger Vangheluwe.
Danneels had been one of the cardinals who campaigned to elect Francis. He got his reward the next year, when the Pope invited Danneels to be guest of honour at the Vatican's Synod on the Family, of all subjects.
Pope Francis also rehabilitated an even more unscrupulous retired cardinal – Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington, whom Pope Benedict XVI had ordered to live in seclusion after he learned he had a long history of abusing trainee priests, even soliciting for sex in the confession box.
Francis knew about McCarrick's habits but nonetheless brought him out of retirement as his private diplomatic representative. Only when McCarrick was accused of assaulting a minor did the Pope strip him of the rank of cardinal.
Admittedly, it was John Paul II, not Francis, who elevated McCarrick, while dismissing reports of serial abuse by monsters such as Fr Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ.
John Paul's stubborn refusal to believe accusations is a stain on his reputation. It seems to have been motivated by his experience in Poland, where the Communists used false abuse claims to undermine the Church.
The explanation for Pope Francis's far worse behaviour may also lie in his home country.
One of the mysteries of his pontificate was his refusal to set foot in Argentina as Pope, despite visiting most other Latin American countries. But we know he had many enemies there – and some truly depraved friends.
The television priest Fr Julio Grassi was Argentina's Jimmy Savile. His orphanage was a cover for assaults on teenage boys. In 2008 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison but remained at large during the appeals process.
The Argentinian Church then produced a 2,800-page 'counter-report' slurring Grassi's young victims as liars and homosexuals.
It was commissioned by the president of the country's bishops' conference – Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, soon to be Pope Francis.
Grassi later claimed that during the failed appeals 'Bergoglio never let go of my hand'.
In the 2019 documentary Code Of Silence, reporters confronted the Pope in St Peter's Square. They asked him if he had attempted to influence Argentinian justice. 'No,' said Francis.
Then why did he commission a counter-inquiry? 'I never did,' said the Pope.
This was a demonstrable lie. Another Argentinian scandal is still unfolding. One of Francis's first acts as pope was to make his protege Fr Gustavo Zanchetta, known as his 'spiritual son', the Bishop of Oran, a remote diocese in the north of the country.
As soon as he arrived, Zanchetta started hanging around the local seminary, making advances to the prettiest boys.
This escalated into revolting assaults, described in court documents drawn up before Zanchetta was found guilty of abusing two young men and sentenced to four and a half years in 2022. The role of the Pope in this squalid drama is disturbing.
Before Zanchetta resigned in 2017, citing 'health reasons', pornographic material was discovered on his phone, including sexual pictures of himself.
Francis was shown it and dismissed it as fake.
What happened next defies belief. After Zanchetta resigned, accused of financial mismanagement of Church funds, as well as sex offences, the Pope summoned him to Rome, where he created a job for him as 'assessor of the Vatican treasury'.
When Zanchetta was dragged back to Argentina to be tried, the Vatican refused the court's request to produce the findings of its own secret investigation into the bishop.
Citing 'health problems' again, Zanchetta persuaded the court to let him serve his sentence in a Vatican hotel.
Meanwhile the Pope sent investigators to Oran, in what locals claimed was 'a Vatican-authorised campaign of retaliation against those who gave evidence against the bishop'.
The drama continues. Last autumn, Zanchetta was spotted in Rome; he had been given permission to receive medical treatment there.
He was ordered to return by April 1 this year – but, as the Catholic investigative journalism website The Pillar reported on April 14, he had gone missing.
Meanwhile, where is the artist-cum-predator Rupnik? In March the Italian news outlet Daily Compass revealed this accused rapist had been given refuge in the majestic hilltop convent of the Benedictine Sisters of Priscilla in Montefiolo, in the Sabine Hills north of Rome.
The plan was to move the sisters out so the convent could house an 'artistic community' run by Rupnik's disciples.
According to Anna, Rupnik would use theological language while molesting her. Soon after she took her religious vows, she said, he attacked her so violently she lost her virginity. She said Rupnik abused 20 nuns, one of whom broke her arm trying to resist him. Pictured: Pope Francis greets Jesuit Father Marko Rupnik in 2022
But that was before Pope Francis's sudden decline. Last month Ed Condon, a Church lawyer who edits The Pillar, noted that the Vatican was finally making preparations to try Rupnik.
Meanwhile, the Jesuits were paying compensation to his alleged victims, while his mosaics were being shrouded.
'What has changed?' Condon asked. One possibility was high-profile institutions 'feel suddenly comfortable stepping publicly away from Rupnik and towards his alleged victims as a result of the Pope's recent infirmity'.
In other words, the priest who appears to have run a sex cult in which he raped young women was suddenly vulnerable because his protector was on his deathbed.
If that is true, then it is hard to read the tributes to the 'people's Pope' without feeling sick.
Francis's culpability in the cases of Rupnik, Grassi and Zanchetta has been established beyond reasonable doubt. And there are other scandals that raise questions about his apparent willingness to use his office to protect sex criminals.
Why, for example, did Francis's chief of staff Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra issue an order last September reinstating the defrocked Argentinian priest Ariel Alberto Principi, twice convicted of child sexual abuse?
His order was later cancelled, but on whose instructions was he acting? Although Pena Parra was very close to Francis, we may never know if it was the Pope's doing – but it would certainly not be out of character.
What we do know is that, at the time of Francis's death, Grassi and Rupnik were still priests and Zanchetta was still a bishop.
And there is one final disturbing detail – a small thing, perhaps, but revealing. Until a new Pope is elected, Francis's apartment remains sealed with a red ribbon. Inside, hanging on the wall, is a mosaic by Rupnik.