A Peruvian survivor of clergy abuse is asking Pope Leo XIV for a personal audience following the Vatican’s recent decision to grant a priest she accuses of abuse a dispensation from ministry — a move she says leaves her and her sisters “defenseless” and their case “definitively unresolved,” according to statements she released over the weekend.
According to LifeSiteNews, Ana María Quispe Díaz, who has long alleged that Father Eleuterio Vásquez González — known locally as “Lute” — abused her and two of her sisters when they were children, said she was informed on November 13 that the priest had been dispensed from priestly duties. She expressed deep concern that this step effectively ends any canonical process into the allegations. “With this dispensation, there will be no canonical investigation, no process, no trial,” Díaz said, according to the report. “And therefore, there will never be justice nor true moral reparation.”
Díaz said the dispensation leaves the facts she and her sisters reported “never even minimally investigated,” and criticized what she called “a papal grace that frees the abuser from facing the responsibility that corresponds to him,” according to her statement. She added that the only assistance ever offered to her family was “payment for therapy.”
According to LifeSiteNews, Díaz first met Archbishop Robert Prevost — now Pope Leo XIV — in 2022 when he was bishop of Chiclayo. She maintains that she and her sisters told him directly that they were abused by Vásquez in 2007. While she says Prevost encouraged her to report the matter to civil authorities, she also claims he indicated the Church “could not do much to help,” according to the report.
SNAP co-founder Peter Isley voiced criticism earlier this year, saying, “Prevost, after he gets this report, he tells the victims, ‘I believe you,’ and then he does nothing that he’s supposed to do under Peruvian policy that he himself set up,” according to statements reported in May.
Officials in Peru, however, have disputed these assertions. The Diocese of Chiclayo previously rejected claims that Prevost acted negligently, and current Bishop Edinson Farfán stated that Prevost “did not fail to act properly” and that the case details were sent to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, according to earlier diocesan statements.
At the same time, Peruvian canon lawyer Msgr. Ricardo Coronado-Arrascue — who initially represented Díaz and her sisters — has alleged that Prevost failed to follow canonical norms, including those required by the Peruvian Bishops’ Conference. He told LifeSiteNews that Vásquez was a “close friend” of Prevost during his time in Chiclayo and that supposed restrictions placed on Vásquez were “practically non-existent,” according to the report.
Coronado-Arrascue was himself laicized in December 2024 and maintains that serious violations of canon law occurred during the process. He also believes his involvement in the Vásquez case contributed to the Vatican’s disciplinary measures against him, according to the report.
Díaz has additionally expressed concern about how some media outlets have portrayed her family’s testimony. “We have had to witness how, in recent months, some media outlets and widely followed journalists have manipulated our testimony to conceal these errors,” she said, according to her statement.
She also noted that a letter from a Chiclayo priest acknowledged “formal errors” in how her accusations were handled by Church officials, saying the absence of an investigation “leaves us defenseless against the accusations we face when we take this step.”
Díaz now plans to bring her case before victims’ associations internationally “so that it may be heard and to work together for real change within the Church.” She is also asking the Vatican’s Commission for the Protection of Minors to examine the procedural failures she says occurred “and take measures in response to the violation we have endured,” according to her statement.
Finally, she is seeking a meeting with Pope Leo XIV “to explain the pain that situations like this cause victims and to ask him for a change.”
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