The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) nullified a ruling from the Secretariat of State that reinstated an Argentine priest convicted of child sexual abuse.
In 2021, Fr Ariel Alberto Príncipi was accused of the sexual abuse of minors while performing “healing prayers” associated with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. The Diocese of Córdoba’s tribunal found him guilty in June 2023, a ruling ratified in April this year by the inter-diocesan tribunal of Buenos Aires.
The DDF was due to confirm the canonical conviction and Príncipi’s laicisation, but on 23 September Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, the sostituto or papal chief of staff at the Secretariat of State, sent a message to Príncipi’s former bishop suspending the laicisation.
He told Bishop Adolfo Uriona of Villa de la Concepción del Río Cuarto that the ruling had been suspended as part of an “extraordinary procedure”, following the submission of new evidence by Argentine bishops and lay people in June and July 2024.
Peña Parra – who as sostituto is considered the third most senior figure in the Vatican – decreed that Principi was banned from contact with minors or exercising pastoral ministry but could still celebrate Mass privately.
Two weeks later, Bishop Uriona received a message from Archbishop John Kennedy, secretary of the DDF’s discipline section, confirming Príncipi had been expelled from the clerical state. Furthermore, Kennedy said the 2023 decision to laicise Principi “should be considered valid in all its parts”, adding that “consequently, the case has been closed”.
He also said that the “extraordinary process” conducted “outside the scope of the dicastery” had “been voided” by the DDF.
“The Secretariat of State has communicated that the case is once again subject to the ordinary process in this Dicastery, according to the norms foreseen by Church Law.”
Under the 2022 apostolic constitution of the Roman Curia Praedicate Evangelium, clerical abuse cases are within the competency of the DDF. Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández’s appointment as prefect of the dicastery last year exempted him from the regular operation of the discipline section, making Archbishop Kennedy the normal authority in such cases.
Marie Collins, a survivor of clerical sexual abuse and a former member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, said laicisation was an “appropriate” sanction for Príncipi that had been “put in place to protect children”. She expressed concern that Kennedy had been obliged to intervene.
“No one should interfere with this sanction,” she told The Tablet, saying there had been an “effort to overturn a proper disciplinary sanction”.
Collins resigned from the pontifical commission in 2017 in protest at curial resistance to its recommendations, amid wider concerns about discipline structures of the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed at the time by Cardinal Gerhard Müller.
“Where is the transparency and zero tolerance we have been promised?” Collins asked.
She spoke shortly after reporting that Müller had failed to remove a claim that she had called him a liar from a new edition of the book Vatican Confidential: A Candid Conversation with Cardinal Gerhard Müller, written with the Italian journalist Franca Giasoldati. In a post on social media, Collins emphatically denied making the accusation.
“When the book was published in Italian last year my lawyer requested this piece be removed from future editions,” she said. “This was ignored and it now appears in the English edition. What the cardinal says about me in this book is unjust.”
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