Stop Celebrating the New Pope: He Walks, Looks, and Quacks Like a Pedo Protector

The diocese also claimed all material concerning the diocesan investigation was sent to Rome, to the office of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which would subsequently file the case.

The three young women insist they were never summoned for testimony by any ‘investigator’ and that there was no trace of this investigation or any other examination by the Vatican Dicastery.

The only time they were able to present their story to an investigator officially appointed by the diocese was when Prevost's successor apostolic administrator, Bishop Guillermo Cornejo Monzón, opened (‘reopened’ according to the diocese) an investigation in December 2023. This was after Ana, exasperated by the diocese's silence, made her story public via social media.

In doing so, she allegedly discovered at least seven other cases of young girls abused by the two priests.

According to the diocese, however, the papers concerning the case have again been submitted to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, where they are still awaiting examination.

The matter remains unresolved but, as the Daily Compass notes, certain unflattering facts are beyond dispute.

-Since the first report in 2020, Prevost has done nothing to clarify the substance of the allegations.

-Even after the formal complaint in April 2022, nothing concrete has been done. The diocese has furnished no proof a canonical investigation has begun and that the three alleged victims have been deposed.

-On January 30, 2023, Pope Francis appointed Prevost prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops with the title archbishop-bishop emeritus of Chiclayo. At this time, the case had not yet received international press, but in the Peruvian Church the affair was already known and, according to what the Daily Compass was able to ascertain, even the Pontiff had been warned of the risk.

-Lute and Yesquen are not the only alleged pedophile clerics who have enjoyed amenable treatment by Prevost.

On March 8, 1999, Prevost assumed the role of Prior Provincial of the Order of St. Augustine's Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel based in Chicago. In 2001, Prevost was elected Prior General of the Order of Saint Augustine, serving two consecutive six-year terms until 2013.

In 2000, Prevost personally permitted James Ray, an Augustinian priest, to reside at St. John Stone Friary in Chicago under supervision. This was despite compelling evidence that Ray was a pedophile.

Ray had been suspended from public ministry since 1991 due to credible accusations that he had sexually abused minors.

Ray had been restricted in ministry for nine years by 2000, and had been accused multiple times of sexually abusing boys, at least one of them for years. He had admitted to bringing at least one boy to sleep in his rectory bed, but said of one allegation he “did not recall” having sexually assaulted a child with whom he admitted to having “cuddled.” Ray did admit to diocesan officials that in 1993 he engaged in sexual activity with a paraplegic man while on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, a supposed Marian apparition site in Croatia.

According to church records, several boys in the Chicago area were molested by Ray, some as young as 10 and abused for as long as six years.

In 1999, he was accused of touching a “boy’s genitals under his clothing,” the church records show.

More accusations have followed in recent years, including one from a Florida man who in a 2020 suit alleged that, as a boy, he was subjected to “sexual abuse, sexual torture and molestation” by Ray between 1983 and 1987.

Despite this most unholy behavior, Prevost had no problem allowing Ray to shack up at a friary located a mere 400 feet from a parish elementary school.

Prevost was later criticized because of the friary's proximity to the school. Ray was moved to other housing in 2002 after US bishops implemented new policies on sexual abuse.

Ray was by no means the only monster to live at the same friary.

Since 1986, Augustinian priest Richard J. McGrath was the president of Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox, Illinois. In 2013, he was appointed treasurer of the Chicago Augustinian Province and worked alongside Prevost. McGrath and Prevost also lived in the same Augustinian community in New Lenox for part of 1988.

In 2017, a student reported seeing a nude image of a boy on McGrath’s cell phone while he was a spectator at a wrestling match. The police investigated McGrath, but the case ended up being dropped after he refused to cooperate and wouldn’t turn over his phone, which conveniently disappeared.

McGrath subsequently was accused in a lawsuit of having “repeatedly orally and anally” raped a student years earlier. The priest denied those accusations but refused to say when questioned under oath for a deposition whether he had ever viewed child pornography, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Church officials settled that suit with the accuser in late 2023 for $2 million, but wouldn’t admit any wrongdoing.

In 2024, after hiding the names of sexually abusive priests and religious brothers for years, the Augustinian Catholic order posted its first public listing of clergy members in its Chicago province deemed to have been child predators, listing five men.

But the list didn’t include McGrath.

In December 2018, Associated Press reported McGrath's whereabouts were unknown and that he’d left the Augustinian friary house of his own volition sometime earlier that year.

The Augustinians have still not provided any information on McGrath's current canonical status. On November 30, 2023, David Clohessy, former director of SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), and Tim Law, founder of Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA), filed a formal complaint with the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States against Cardinals Prevost and Blase Cupich, Bishops Ronald Hicks of Joliet and David Malloy of Rockford, and Father Anthony Pizzo, Prevost's successor as Prior General of the Augustinians, for allowing McGrath to live free, unsupervised, and unpunished, with his whereabouts unknown due to their inaction and lack of cooperation.

The signatories called on the Vatican to take "severe, immediate, and corrective" measures against the five officials due to their "repeated and willful recklessness, insensitivity, and secrecy" in the McGrath case.

Attorney Josh Peck of the abuse law firm Jeff Anderson & Associates called in December 2023 for the Augustinians to be held accountable in the McGrath case for failing to take immediate steps to protect McGrath's victims and for failing to publish a list of clergy members with credible allegations of sexual abuse.

"The actions of Richard McGrath and Augustinian officials are not isolated cases. Covering up for offenders, evading accountability, and putting children in danger remain the modus operandi of much of the Catholic hierarchy," Peck charged.

The Cover-Up Continues: The Church Turns on its Investigator

On February 14, 2024, the pope appointed Monsignor Edinson Farfán Córdova to be Prevost’s successor as the new bishop of Chiclayo. This was shortly after Prevost's successor apostolic administrator in Chiclayo, Monsignor Cornejo Monzón opened the Lute-Yusquan investigation in December 2023.

Farfán just happens to be an Augustinian like Prevost and a personal friend of his predecessor. Prevost himself participated in Farfán's episcopal consecration.

Not only that, but in Chuquibambamill, Farfán was accused of covering up the abuse of another Augustinian priest, Don Juan Carlos Olaya.

As the Daily Compass explains:

“In practice, Cardinal Prevost had one of his friends and confreres appointed to be his successor, who in fact immediately set about ‘cleaning up’ the Prefect's past.”

Farfán “put up a wall of silence against journalists who tried to investigate the allegations against Father Lute,” eventually publishing the September 10 communiqué that was promptly denounced by the three alleged victims.

Farfán “has obstructed in every way the work of the canon lawyer, Monsignor Ricardo Coronado Arrascue”, who since May 6, 2024 has taken on the case of the three women accusing Father Lute and Cardinal Prevost, “first by refusing to meet him and then by rejecting the legitimacy of his appointment, so that he could be denied access to the documents relating to the investigation.”

The obstruction shifted into high gear on August 24, 2024, when the Peruvian Episcopal Conference declared - without explanation - that “Rev. Ricardo Coronado Arrascue, from the clergy of the diocese of Cajamarca, cannot receive approval to serve as an ecclesiastical lawyer and must be prohibited from exercising sponsorship in cases already in progress.”

In a letter issued 5 days later, the bishop of Cajamarca informed Coronado that a charge had been filed against him with the Dicastery of the Clergy at the Vatican for an alleged unspecified crime “contra sextum” (according to the Daily Compass, its sources report this alleged crime is “a stable relationship with a consenting adult”).

The letter offers him the option of making a voluntary request to the Pope to ask for dispensation from the priesthood within 15 days, otherwise face the threat of an “administrative criminal trial”.

The charade continued with a September 14 communiqué from the Peruvian Episcopal Conference, declaring their criminal proceedings against Coronado had begun. This, they audaciously declared, was proof they were serious about stamping out abuse among the clergy.

As the Daily Compass points out:

“If we think of the slowness and reticence in the Vatican regarding recent sexual abuse scandals, the speed and severity of the measures against Monsignor Coronado (who, moreover, denies all the accusations) are surprising and more than a little suspicious, given also that it is not a question of abuse but possibly of relations between consenting adults.”

There has been no further mention of Monsignor Ricardo Coronado Arrascue at the Peruvian Episcopal Conference website since September 14, 2024.

American Catholics Delighted: “Our Child Abuse Concealer Beat Your Child Abuse Concealer!”

In the contest for the papacy, Prevost beat out five other cardinals who have also been implicated in child abuse cover-ups: Peter Erdo, from Hungary, Kevin Farrell, from Ireland, Victor Manuel Fernandez, from Argentina, Mario Grech, from Malta, and Luis Antonio Tagle, from the Philippines.