The Service of the Church 

PART ONE

On April 25, 2025, during Easter week, we wrote to a good friend: “Pope Francis has died in grim circumstances. No particular repentance for the sacrilegious synodal reform of the Church that he leaves behind, and it was never reported that he received the Last Sacraments. Our hearts and prayers are now turned towards the next conclave, which will not be synodal... Will it be Our Lord’s chosen one who emerges from this designation made by the cardinals? Nothing is less certain.... Our Lord, however, will in any case grant him directly, personally and infallibly, His power of jurisdiction to govern the Church. He will be the Pope!”

And such was our ‘Christmas joy’, in union with all the faithful who had flocked to Saint Peter’s Square, and ultimately with the whole Church, to hear the Cardinal Protodeacon proclaim, like the Angel in the sky over Bethlehem, to the shepherds, the first to awaken from a slumbering world (cf. Lk 2:10): “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum habemus Papam!” Without knowing Bishop Robert Francis Prévost, Cardinal of the Church of Rome, even by name, we were happy to know that we had a pope – Leo XIV – and were ready to love him. And our joy was not disappointed when he made his first appearance, from the loggia of Saint Peter’s, halfway between heaven and earth, clad in his pontifical vestments and ornaments, signs of the majesty, fullness and sovereignty of the powers that Our Lord had deigned to grant to His Vicar by simply accepting the office offered to him by his brothers in the College of Cardinals at the end of a rapid conclave during which, clearly, the Holy Spirit was prayed to and heeded. So, we had no hesitation in loving him. He was the Holy Father, and what is more, he appeared to us to be so endearing, in his smiling simplicity and his modesty, a little embarrassed at first... nonetheless without weakness. We believe with all our faith that he has received, is receiving, and will receive a flood of graces and enlightenment. The Holy Spirit and Our Lady of Good Counsel will pursue him!

“Peace be with you all” were Leo XIV’s first words. “These are the first words spoken by the risen Christ, the Good Shepherd Who laid down His life for God’s flock. I would like this greeting of peace to resound in your hearts, in your families, among all people, wherever they may be.” The peace to which the world is said to aspire does not come from men because they are all good in their hearts, as Paul VI claimed, but it comes from Jesus Christ, Whom Pope Francis himself had, as it were, forgotten at the time of his first urbi et orbi blessing. Even as Sovereign Pontiff, Leo XIV remains a true religious, faithful to his Rule, faithful to his spiritual Father. He said so himself: “I am a son of Saint Augustine who once said: ‘With you I am a Christian, and for you I am a bishop’. In this sense, all of us can journey together towards the homeland that God has prepared for us.” So the goal of all our work, of this pontificate, remains Heaven, the heavenly homeland. Yet it is necessary to have the Faith.

In the sermon he delivered the following day, Friday, May 9, at the Mass pro Ecclesia concelebrated with the cardinal electors in the Sistine Chapel, Leo XIV bore witness to the faith, to the dogma of the faith, which he summarised in Peter’s profession in response to Jesus’ question: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16). He explained: “In a particular way, God has called me by your election to succeed the Prince of the Apostles, and has entrusted this treasure to me so that, with His help, I may be its faithful administrator (cf. 1 Co 4:2) for the sake of the entire mystical Body of the Church. He has done so in order that she may be ever more fully a city set on a mountain (cf. Ap 21:10), an ark of salvation sailing through the waters of history and a beacon that illumines the dark nights of this world. And this, not so much through the magnificence of her structures or the grandeur of her buildings – like the monuments among which we find ourselves – but rather through the holiness of her members. For we are the people whom God has chosen as His own, so that we may declare the wonderful deeds of Him Who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light.’ (1 P 2:9)”

The Holy Father, however, is concerned about the loss of faith. “Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure. These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied. Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed. A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.” And the Holy Father denounced a “state of practical atheism” even on the part of many baptised Christians. Such words are illuminating, on condition, however, to close our eyes to their clear inadequacy. The loss of faith is certainly a tragedy in this world... but also in the Other... which is not precisely the heavenly Homeland!

And so we can better understand this interpolated clause in this very well-constructed sermon about Our Lord: “In Him, God, in order to make Himself close and accessible to men and women, revealed Himself to us in the trusting eyes of a child, in the lively mind of a young person and in the mature features of a man (cf. Second Vatican Council, Past. Const. Gaudium et Spes, no. 22), finally appearing to His disciples after the resurrection with His glorious body. He thus showed us a model of sanctified humanity that we can all imitate, together with the promise of an eternal destiny that transcends all our limits and abilities.” What about Jesus crucified? Can we imitate Jesus in His Sacred Humanity with the promise of an eternal destiny without the cross? Yet the Holy Father has this cross well in mind: “You have called me to carry this cross and to be blessed by this mission.”

What is most incredible is to be able to contrast Leo XIV’s omission with the magnificent exhortation preached twelve years earlier by Pope Francis, commenting on the same Gospel, in the same circumstances, in a language of clarity and firmness worthy of a Saint Pius X: “This Gospel continues with a situation of a particular kind. The same Peter who confessed Jesus Christ, now says to Him You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. I will follow You, but let us not speak of the Cross. That does not enter into it. I will follow You with other possibilities, without the Cross. When we journey without the Cross, when we build without the Cross, when we profess Christ without the Cross, we are not disciples of the Lord, we are worldly: we may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord. My wish is that all of us, after these days of grace, will have the courage, yes, the courage, to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the Lord’s Cross; to build the Church on the Lord’s Blood that was poured out on the Cross; and to profess the only glory: Christ crucified. In this way, the Church will go forward.”

Although Pope Francis, repeatedly sang of the joy of the Gospel in every possible way, he distributed and squandered mercy without regard for the price Our Lord paid with His Blood; he tore down the borders of the Church to open her up to the foul winds of the world and finally he travelled to the four corners of the earth to announce the advent of universal brotherhood, yet, he never preached the cross.

And the words of Our Lord come spontaneously to us from our pen:

“A man had two sons. Addressing the first, he said: ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but, overcome with remorse he went. Then he said to the second the same; and the other said, ‘I will, Lord,’ and he did not go.” (Mt 21:28-30)

Thus, contrary to his words and his commitments, Pope Francis did not go. And Leo XIV seems determined not to go either, not to preach this cumbersome Cross, this divisive Cross, this folly of the Gospel message whereby “it pleased God to save those who believe” (1 Co 1:21). Yet, could it be that, overcome with remorse, he will finally go to work in the Lord’s vineyard? After all, between these two popes with such different characters, there is an obvious affinity for our hope and our anguish.

“NEMO DAT QUOD NON HABET”

It is impossible to evoke the first known elements of the Holy Father’s biography without being impressed by a full life spent in the service of the Church, following a continuous upward path, exercising increasingly important offices, leaving behind him a unanimous feeling of satisfaction on the part of his peers, his superiors and his subjects. Nevertheless, we are invincibly gripped by the anguish that was felt by Father de Nantes, our Founder, dreading the consequences of the break with Tradition that the Second Vatican Council provoked within the Church herself. And the young Robert Francis Prévost, born on September 14, 1955, Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, in Chicago, the third largest city in the United States, is necessarily a victim of this break.

Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI received from the Church all the treasures of Tradition. Instead of passing them on as they had received them, they lucidly, and in fact perfidiously, preferred to distort them so as to impose their own doctrines on the whole Church by way of teaching. “Paul VI sought the illusory glory of presiding over this Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy (MASDU§) and of drawing the whole Church behind him into it by transposing his Christian religious preaching into terms of profane humanism. John Paul II had the intellectual goal of achieving ‘the synthesis of the old Religion and of contemporary Atheism,’ that is, ‘their final fulfilment in living Man, rich in possessions and in existence, brought to completion in the feeling of the sacredness of his existence and in the glory of his freedom.’ With this Pope, our Father said, it was ‘overexcitement’ especially with young people, but transitory. For his part, Benedict XVI’s great ambition was to impose his dialectic, a Modernist§ German dialectic, in order to rationalise the mysteries of the Catholic Faith, the ancient representations of which supposedly did not make any sense to modern man.”●

In addition to the heretical doctrines taught from the See of Peter, the young Robert Prévost inherited a very liberal spirit, typical of American Catholicism well before the revolution of the Second Vatican Council.

Indeed, under the influence of Archbishop Gibbons (1834-1921) of Baltimore, the Church in the United States had long been committed “to a policy of unconditional support for American institutions,” as Brother Pierre explains. “Persuaded that the ‘European model’ was obsolete and that the democratic regime as invented by the United States was the way of the future, he considered that the fate of the Catholic religion was bound to it. Therefore, it was necessary to accept American-style democracy loyally and to give proof of it. In particular, the Church had to admit the separation of the state and religion as a sine qua non condition of the durability of democratic institutions. Thus, she had to set an example of respect for religious freedom, of constant dialogue with the other religious “denominations”, and of struggle against intolerance.” (The Catholic Renaissance no. 144, January 2007)

Such principles irresistibly led the American Catholic faithful and their clergy to blend in with American society, embracing its mores, both materialism and exaltation of individual freedom. As a result, the Catholic faith in the United States has become noticeably weaker. “And if the Church had taken such an interest in social justice,” Brother Pierre points out, “it was also with the concern to prove that she was not the enemy of human happiness here below (...). Thus it was that even in the Catholic Church, the importance of the Cross of Christ diminished, while family or convivial virtues, respect for others became the ideal of religion (...). It is, moreover, noteworthy that this populous American Church has produced so few saints, compared with the French Canadian Church! Likewise, there would be practically no Catholic literature or art in the United States.

“By agreeing to religious freedom, the American Church has deprived herself of integral Catholicism and became in the thirties a movement for the spiritual animation of Democracy.” (The Catholic Renaissance n^o145, February 2007)

Having lived in a society very much imbued with such principles, the Holy Father has necessarily been deprived of this very idea of integral Catholicism, in the name of which the Church has the right to look at and judge all aspects of life in society, and first and foremost the political institutions that can be decisive for the salvation of souls and the salvation of nations.

In the first analysis, therefore, Leo XIV will not be able to give what he has not received from the Church through the very fault of those who preceded him in the See of Peter. Nevertheless, he enjoys a very special grace whereby the Holy Spirit assists him in fulfilling his office, in particular in order to understand, which presupposes, on his part, considerable work and therefore much time. And this is quite possible, because he has received abundantly from the Church, through his membership of the Order of Saint Augustine. This is a first point of convergence and similarity with Pope Francis, who was a Jesuit. It is remarkable that the Good God should have allowed two popes from two great orders to succeed one another on the throne of Saint Peter. Would it be part of God’s plan for the recovery of the Church that religious orders should play a key role? We are convinced of this when we re-read these few luminous words of our Father Georges de Nantes: “The Third Vatican Council will recall the constant doctrine of the Church concerning the superiority of religious life that is consecrated by vows over secular life. People in the world, even Christians, do not live for God alone, do not think of God alone, cannot obey God alone. According to Saint Paul, they are divided. To deny so would be pride and falsehood. On the contrary, the Church guarantees that religious life is the most favourable condition for the exclusive service and worship of God alone, and for the proclaiming of the Gospel to the poor.”●

The history of the Order of Saint Augustine proper began on December 16, 1243 with the bull Incubit nobis, which Pope Innocent IV issued to call several hermit communities in Tuscany to unite into a single religious order based on the rule and life of Saint Augustine. In March 1244, the hermits held a founding chapter in Rome under the leadership of Cardinal Richard Annibaldi. The Pope instructed the hermits to elect their own prior general and to draw up a set of constitutions. They became known as the Order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine (OHSA). On April 9, 1256, Pope Alexander IV issued the bull Licet ecclesiæ catholicæ, whereby he confirmed the aggregation to the Order of other congregations subject to the rule of Saint Augustine or Saint Benedict in “the single profession and regular observance of the Order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine”. The Order thus took its place among the mendicant friars alongside the Dominicans and Franciscans, followed shortly afterwards by the Carmelites. The Order of Saint Augustine had great influence in Italy and throughout Europe, participating not only in the reform of religious life, but also in the unity of the Church, with works of education and preaching to neglected populations. It also had a great intellectual influence.●

The Order officially has only four canonised saints: Saint John of Saint-Facond, Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, Saint John of Sahagun and, above all, Saint Thomas de Villeneuve (Villanova), archbishop of Valencia. “Father of the poor, tireless preacher, ascetic with frightening mortifications, he was also an uncompromising defender of the rights and freedoms of the Church against the encroachments of royal officials. A contemporary of Luther – allegedly a disciple of Saint Augustine – he had a clear vision of the cause of the evils afflicting the Church in the 16^th century (...). He worked with all his might to bring about the convening of Council of Trent, which he was unable to attend because he was ill.”●

The Order’s development spread beyond Europe to the fledgling United States, following its independence in 1776. The population was widely scattered, with very few priests to minister to Catholics, when Bishop John Carrol of Baltimore appealed for priests to come to America. The Augustinians in Ireland sent Father John Rosseter to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1794. Bishop Carroll was so pleased with his ministry that he asked the Order for other friars to establish a permanent community. Father Matthew Carr was appointed to this new mission field. He arrived in 1796 and made Philadelphia the centre of Augustinian missionary activity. These were the beginnings, admittedly very difficult, of the first Augustinian province placed under the patronage of Saint Thomas de Villeneuve. It is worth noting that the first local recruit was a certain Michael Hurley, who, once ordained a priest in Italy in 1802, played a decisive role in the Order’s first American province, as well as in the life of Saint Elizabeth Seton, whom he met in Saint Peter’s Church in New York and whose spiritual director he became. As their numbers grew, the Augustinians extended their presence and ministry to the neighbouring states to the east, making it very difficult to maintain community life.

In May 1844, anti-Catholic rioters razed not only Saint Augustine’s Church in Philadelphia, but also the monastery and other buildings, as well as the theological library, which contained no fewer than three thousand books. This tragedy gave rise to Villanova College, which was to become the great Augustinian university centre and the starting point for new foundations. As the number of vocations increased, so did its influence. On August 25, 1874, the Province numbered forty-five friars and served more than fourteen parishes in four states.

In 1905, a church and a school dedicated to Saint Rita were founded in Chicago, followed by many others in several Midwestern states, which in 1941 constituted the second Augustinian province, dedicated to Our Lady of Good Counsel. The Order never ceased to experience prodigious growth in the United States: seventeen foundations in the 1920s, five in the 1940s and twelve in the 1950s, not to mention missions to Cuba in 1899, which the Order had to leave in 1961, Nagasaki in Japan in 1952 and in northern Peru in 1963, precisely in Chulucanas.

FROM CHICAGO TO CHICLAYO

Young Robert Francis’s father, Louis Marius, a former lieutenant in the US Navy during the Second World War who became a school headmaster, is of French and Italian origin. His mother, Mildred Martinez, a librarian, was of Spanish origin. He has two brothers, Louis Martín and John Joseph.

“It was through the parish that I had my first experience of the Church at the local level,” he explains. “I also went to a parish school. Thanks to the proximity of certain diocesan priests, the idea of becoming a priest began to germinate within me. Then I discovered my religious family: the Augustinians. After a period of discernment – and after meeting other young people who had joined this community – I decided to enter the minor seminary at the age of fourteen.”

He would never leave this religious Order, not even during his higher education, which he pursued at Villanova University, near Philadelphia, where he studied philosophy and obtained a degree in mathematics in 1977.

On September 1, 1977 – he was twenty-two years old – he entered the novitiate of the Order of Saint Augustine in Saint Louis, in the province of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Chicago. He took his first vows in 1978, followed by his solemn vows in 1981, and completed a licentiate degree in theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

As his superiors noticed his brilliant intellectual qualities, he was sent to Rome, where he was ordained a priest on June 19 1982 by Bishop Jean Jadot, President of the Pontifical Council for Non-Christians, to study canon law at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum). He obtained his degree in 1984.

His first stay was at the Augustinian mission of Chulucanas, in northern Peru, between 1985 and 1986. On his return, he defended his doctoral thesis in Canon Law (“The Role of the Local Prior in the Order of Saint Augustine”) and was appointed vocation director and missions director of the Augustinian Province of Mother of Good Counsel.

Second stay in Peru, from 1988 to 1999 in the mission of Trujillo, further south on the Pacific coast, as director of the joint formation project for Augustinian candidates from the vicariates of Chulucanas, Iquitos, and Apurímac. Over the course of eleven years, he served as prior of the community (1988-1992), formation director (1988-1998), and instructor for professed members (1992-1998), and in the Archdiocese of Trujillo as judicial vicar (1989-1998) and professor of Canon Law, Patristics, and Moral Theology at the Major Seminary ‘San Carlos y San Marcelo.’ At the same time, he was also entrusted with the pastoral care of Our Lady Mother of the Church, later established as the parish of Saint Rita (1988-1999), in a poor suburb of the city, and was parish administrator of Our Lady of Monserrat from 1992 to 1999.

He returned to Chicago in 1999, where he was elected Provincial Prior of the Augustinian Province of Mother of Good Counsel, before finally taking over as Prior General of the Order of Saint Augustine at the General Chapter in 2001. His term of office was renewed in 2007 for a second term, following a ballot that lasted just a few minutes, which would end in 2013.

During this period, Father Prévost, as Superior General, visited the Order’s foundations in some fifty countries, including Argentina in 2004. During his stay, he presided over the inauguration of the Augustinian Library in Buenos Aires. The meeting ended with a Mass of Thanksgiving on August 28, the solemnity of Saint Augustine, in the parish of Saint Augustine in Buenos Aires, presided over by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio and concelebrated by Father Prévost. Did the two men get on perfectly? Apparently not, because when Cardinal Prévost learned of Cardinal Bergoglio’s elevation to the sovereign pontificate, he concluded that he would never be appointed bishop. Having been brought together under the aegis of Saint Augustine in Buenos Aires in 2004, the two men were to meet again in Rome in 2013 for the General Chapter of the Order, which opened on August 28, in the Basilica of Saint Augustine in Rome during a Mass celebrated by Pope Francis, to whom Saint Augustine inspired a quite simply marvellous sermon, which makes us measure how far he then fell.

We are struck by his words about Saint Monica, which are so representative of our feelings towards the Holy Father: “How many tears did that holy woman shed for her son’s conversion! And today too how many mothers shed tears so that their children will return to Christ! Do not lose hope in God’s grace! In the Confessions we read this sentence that a bishop said to Saint Monica who was asking him to help her son find the road to faith: ‘It is not possible that the son of so many tears should perish’ (III 12:21). After his conversion Augustine himself, addressing God, wrote: ‘My mother, Your faithful one, wept before You on my behalf more than mothers are wont to weep the bodily death of their children’ (ibid., III 11:19) (...). And Augustine was Monica’s heir, from her he received the seed of restlessness. This, then, is the restlessness of love: ceaselessly seeking the good of the other, of the beloved, without ever stopping and with the intensity that leads even to tears. Then I think of Jesus weeping at the tomb of his friend Lazarus; of Peter who, after denying Jesus, encounters His gaze full of mercy and love, weeps bitterly, and of the Father who waits on the terrace for his son’s return and when he spies him still far off runs to meet him; the Virgin Mary comes to mind lovingly following Her Son Jesus even to the Cross.”

Pope François told Father Prévost, who had resigned as Superior General, that he could now ‘rest’. Father Prévost returned to Chicago where he served as director of formation, and exercised the functions of first councillor, and provincial vicar

His ‘rest^’ was to be short-lived. On November 3, 2014, Pope Francis appointed him as Apostolic Administrator of the Peruvian Diocese of Chiclayo and he received the episcopal consecration on December 12, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in the Cathedral of Santa Maria. He chose as his motto for the rest of his life: “In Illo uno unum”, taken from words pronounced by Saint Augustine to explain that “although we Christians are many, in the one Christ we are one.” The Holy Father appointed him Bishop of Chiclayo a year later, on November 26, 2015, and he would administer a second diocese, that of Callao near Lima, from April 15, 2020.

The question that needs to be asked is why did Pope Francis decide to put a religious of the Order of Saint Augustine, and what is more, an American citizen, at the head of this Peruvian diocese. First we need to look at the situation of the Church in Peru.

GUTIERREZ’S REVENGE

In April 2013, at the very beginning of Pope Francis’ pontificate, Brother Pierre undertook a very interesting review of the book Globalisation and Christian Humanism – Perspectives on Latin America, written by Guzman Carriquiry-Lecour, a Uruguayan lawyer at the Vatican. The book was published in French in 2007 by Cardinal Ouellet, then Archbishop of Quebec. “The last chapter describes the situation of the Church in Latin America since the Council,” Brother Pierre writes, “but after recalling the extent to which this Church has been persecuted since the 18^th century, resisting only through the attachment of her clergy to the Pope and to popular devotions. However, the incessant conflicts with public authority have meant that even today Latin America has the lowest percentage of priests in relation to the number of Catholics. As a result, ‘the Catholic tradition of the Latin American peoples has long been transmitted orally, by mothers and grandparents and through manifestations of popular piety.’

“The Latin episcopate played little part in the work of the Council, which nonetheless immediately had immense repercussions. It ‘released an explosive charge of novelty, enthusiasm and criticism, of experimentation and renewal, at all levels, but also a charge of impatience and insecurity, and even of confusion, which was to lead to a post-conciliar phase of trials and of intimate and dramatic commotion. This will be the time of a great crisis of ecclesial renewal.’

“This strong jolt was ‘perhaps indispensable,’ writes Guzman Carriquiry-Lecour cautiously.

“The fact remains that the Church was submerged by two waves of theological errors: liberation theology, which went so far as to advocate violent participation in revolutions, and secularisation theology, inspired by the Protestants Bultmann and Tillich, who abolished all ‘Catholic’ mediations between God and man (...).

“The episcopate began to react in 1975, and especially after the Puebla meeting in 1978. John Paul II’s travels facilitated this recovery: they brought the institutional Church back to the fore and gave new impetus to popular piety, which was the real antidote to the theology of secularisation. What is more, by involving the Church in the defence of human rights and the establishment of democracy, John Paul II took the wind out of the sails of the revolutionaries.”●

Peru has not escaped these two “waves of theological errors”, particularly that of liberation theology, since it was the cradle of this movement with Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, a priest of the diocese of Lima. In 1971, when he was a student chaplain, he wrote his first major treatise, Essai pour une théologie de la libération, which met with great success and was translated all over the world. “The creation of a just and fraternal society is the salvation of human beings, if by salvation we mean the passage from the less human to the more human. It is impossible to be a Christian today without a commitment to liberation,” he wrote. “Liberation theology tells the poor that their current situation is not God’s will.” This outrageous theology led to appalling tragedies, with priests abandoning their ministry to come to the aid of the poor, to make amends for human injustice and even to take up arms.

In 1984, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, i.e. Cardinal Ratzinger, very timidly condemned this doctrine on account of its political vision of the Gospel and the Marxist consequences it claimed to draw from it, yet, at the same time, he praised the virtue of the aim sought by its founder. This did not prevent John Paul II from referring to this theology of liberation in his encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, published in 1987, which our Father did not hesitate to describe as Marxist.

While John Paul II was prepared to preach the Human Rights revolution on his travels, particularly in Chile and Haiti, there was no question of it spreading within the very ranks of the Church, within her institutions, particularly in Peru.

In this country, to counter the influence of liberation theology in the minds of the clergy, he relied on the apostolic life society Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana and Opus Dei. Our Father was frankly opposed to the movement founded by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, which had been raised to the rank of a personal prelature. He contested it mainly for its liberalism in the political sphere, for its unprecedented, even Marxist exaltation of work, leading to the promotion of the laity to the detriment of vocations and religious consecration. However, this movement, in perfect harmony with the conciliar reform and the doctrines of John Paul II, proved to be fairly orthodox from the point of view of doctrine, very enterprising and very effective in its works, all the more so as it enjoyed considerable financial support.

In 2012, out of the forty-eight dioceses in Peru, ten bishops came from the ranks of Opus Dei, including Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, Archbishop of Lima, who was personally very hostile to the spirit of liberation theology, which he combated even within the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PCUP). We might mention also Bishop Ortega from the Prelature of Juli and Bishop Kay Martin Schmalhausen (in fact the latter was a member of Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana) as the head of the Prelature of Ayaviri in the Peruvian Andes. When they arrived, they both had to refocus their pastoral work on the Gospel and no longer on human rights.

Markus Degen, a Fidei-Donum priest from Oberwil in the canton of Basel- Landschaft, in Switzerland, who has been working in the neighbouring diocese of Puno for almost forty years, explains:

“The starting point of our ecclesial activity is the people of the Andes, a poor people, a believing people, animated by a very particular culture and practising a unique syncretism. We have endeavoured to accompany them with respect and to pass on to them the joyful message of the loving, good and merciful God. The new bishops of Juli and Ayaviri have made it clear that they do not agree with this spirituality.”

So it seems that the Peruvian clergy is divided according to its affinity or its distrust of the spirit of liberation theology, between those who exercise their ministry essentially to ensure the spiritual good of souls with a view to Heaven and those who intend, in addition... or first of all, to bring them the goods of this earth of which they are unjustly deprived and to which, by God’s will, they would have a right, thus promoting a poor Church at the service of the poor.

In addition to this first cause of division, there is the country’s great political instability, which must be compensated for by the Church, who remains an institution of stability. The Church also benefits from a concordat signed in 1980, which still preserves its legal prerogatives to which the very aggressive Protestant sects cannot lay claim. In 2018, the Vatican Press Office reported that almost 90% of the Peruvian population was Catholic (Statistics of the Catholic Church in Chile and Peru, January 11, 2018, https: //www. vaticannews. va/en/).

On January 21, 2018, during his visit to Peru, Pope Francis preached reconciliation to the bishops. In 2019, however, it became all too clear which way his pastoral concerns were leaning when, on the very day he accepted Cardinal Cipriani’s resignation, he appointed Father Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio, a lecturer at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and a former collaborator and disciple of Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, to head the diocese of Lima.

Nevertheless, in 2014, at the very beginning of his pontificate, he first had to settle the question of the diocese of Chiclayo.

Brother Pierre-Julien of Divine Mary.

(to be continued)