Diocese in Chiclayo, Peru, Disputes Online Claims Pope Leo XIV Covered Up Abuse

Social media posts began circulating a day before the conclave that elected Robert Prevost, who took the name Leo XIV. The posts claimed that, before his election, he had covered up cases of sexual abuse in the dioceses of Chicago, United States, and Chiclayo, Peru. The claim most often repeated concerned an alleged cover-up of an abuse report involving three girls between 9 and 11 years old in Peru in 2004. These are allegations circulating online, not findings of a court.

On May 6, 2025, websites including InfoVaticana circulated a document called the “Prevost Report,” an 18-page dossier that accused Cardinal Prevost, then prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, of having covered up several cases of sexual abuse in the United States and Peru. The dossier cites a September 9, 2024, report by the Peruvian program *Cuarto Poder* titled “Exobispo de Chiclayo kept sexual abuse cases silent.” According to El País, the abuses by two Peruvian priests occurred in 2004. Prevost served as Bishop of Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023, more than a decade later.

The Chiclayo diocese said it received a complaint in the first week of April 2022. After a preliminary investigation, the file was sent to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. The diocese said that in the first quarter of 2023, prosecutors told the complainants that civil charges had been dismissed because the alleged facts were time-barred. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith also archived the matter in August 2023. Prevost had been appointed prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops on January 30 of that year and was no longer in Chiclayo.

The dossier also raises two cases in Chicago. It alleges that in 2000, when Prevost was provincial superior of the Augustinians in Chicago, he allowed a priest who had been removed from parish work in 1991 over a sexual abuse case to live in a monastery a few meters from a high school. The source reports these as claims in the dossier. It does not report any confirmed finding on them.

The diocese of Chiclayo issued a statement the day after the report appeared. It said that it “does not correspond to the truth” that Prevost concealed a priest and remained silent before complaints. The diocese also said that one complainant publicly criticized the Dicastery’s decision to archive the case, and that the diocese then reopened the matter from an ecclesiastical perspective even though civil justice had closed it. According to the diocese, that complainant later chose not to take part. As of September 2024, the case remained open within the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. The source notes that the diocese did not respond to a request for its current status before publication.

Peruvian journalists Pedro Salinas and Paola Ugaz had earlier exposed abuse and cover-up within the Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana, a Catholic lay society that was dissolved in 2025 after an investigation commissioned by the late Pope Francis. Ugaz told a radio program on May 8, 2025, that Leo XIV’s role in that work had been decisive and low profile, and she credited his management with the removal of a powerful bishop, the former Archbishop of Piura, José Antonio Eguren, who was dismissed in September 2024. Salinas said the complaints against Prevost appeared to be part of an effort by the Sodalicio to discredit him. The source presents these as the journalists’ views and does not confirm the motive.

On May 8, 2025, after Prevost had taken the name Leo XIV, the Network of Survivors of Priest Abuse (SNAP) issued a statement to the Vatican. It said the group had received the pope’s election “with great concern given their background handling cases of abuse.”

Source: Read the original report (translated from Spanish)