Chai Brady
Archbishop John Kennedy at his desk in the DDF An attempt to reinstate a priest laicised for the sexual abuse of minors by a top Vatican cleric has been decried by a leading Irish child protection campaigner Marie Collins, who warned children would have been put in danger.
The Vatican Secretariat of State tried to undo the laicisation of Ariel Alberto Príncipi, a former diocesan priest convicted of child sexual abuse while in Argentina, but was thwarted by Irishman Archbishop John Joseph Kennedy, head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith disciplinary section.
Archbishop Kennedy declared void the September order from the Secretariat of State to rescind the laicisation in one of the most controversial public clashes between Vatican departments in recent times.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic, Marie Collins said within the Vatican “there is a great emphasis on authority and power and obviously somebody thought that they had enough authority to overturn something that the disciplinary department had set in place”.
“No decision like that should ever be changed unless there’s new evidence or an appeal and the whole case is re-judged and re-examined. I’m 100% behind Archbishop John Kennedy because if his department has decided that that is the appropriate sanction then it is not up to anyone else to undermine that decision,” she said.
“It’s a strong action and he is standing by the decision of his department. What would be the point of having sanctions if they can be just ripped up willy nilly? At the end of the day the safety of children is at stake and that’s what the processes are there for and nobody should be allowed to interfere with that.”
Archbishop Kennedy’s intervention reversed a September 23 order signed by the sostituto of the Secretariat of State – the Pope’s curial chief of staff – Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra.
Regarding Archbishop Peña Parra’s order, Ms Collins said: “There is no place in a disciplinary procedure for anybody to come in with external influence or authority and overturn a decision.
“In the end it is future victims who will suffer… If somebody is walking around, to all intents and purposes to the outsider they are a priest and they will be trusted and respected and that puts any child that comes in their orbit in danger. If they are a convicted child abuser, they should never be allowed to walk around as a priest again.
“The Church knows this, and the disciplinary department knows this, and everyone in the Secretary of State department should know this and the priority should be the safety of children not the perpetrator. It is children that are being put at risk.”
Ms Collins said that if “internal politics” in the Vatican almost led to a child abuser being put back in ministry “they need to sort it out”.
“The first question I would have is where is the transparency? Why did it happen? Who gave instructions that it should happen? What has changed from the decision that he was deserving of being laicised to now he’s not. As someone who has abused a child, he should not have the right to have his laicisation overturned, I would love to know what his victims or the parents of his victims think,” Ms Collins said.
Several complaints of sexual abuse against minors were made against Argentine Fr Ariel Alberto Príncipi in 2021. They centred around the abuse of ‘healing prayers’ in the context of charismatic prayer circles.
Following a years-long canonical process in June 2023 he was found guilty of multiple accounts of sexual abuse.