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Exclusive: Pope Leo XIV critic now says her lawyer might have had a secret agenda
LIMA, PERU - A year ago, the future Pope Leo XIV's reputation came under sudden and unanticipated attack.
Three biological sisters in Peru alleged abuse at the hands of two Catholic priests in then-Bishop Robert Prevost's Chiclayo Diocese. Years after reporting the abuse, they retained a new canon lawyer, previously unknown to the sisters, who amplified their complaints by arranging for national media coverage. The young women began alleging that Prevost mishandled their claims, covered up the allegations, and failed to punish the priests they accused of sexually abusing them as minors.
The allegations continue to dog the new pope.
But the canon lawyer, Ricardo Coronado-Arrascue, now a defrocked priest, has his own trail of problems and an apparent conflict of interest that raises questions about his motives in promoting the allegations against the pope.
In an exclusive interview in Peru with the National Catholic Reporter, one of the sisters, Ana Maria Quispe Diaz, said she initially had no complaints with Prevost and was pleased with her meeting with the future pope.
While Quispe had aired some complaints about Prevost on social media, it wasn't until Coronado-Arrascue volunteered to represent the sisters for free that they began to accuse Prevost of a coverup, turning it into a national cause célèbre.
In retrospect, Quispe said she and her sisters suspect they were taken advantage of primarily to counter Coronado-Arrascue's own legal troubles. "He didn't really want to help us; we concluded that," she told NCR. "He ended up helping us, yes, but not because he wanted to help us."
In an interview for a biography released Sept. 18 in Peru, the new pontiff made his first comments on the matter since he ascended to the papacy May 8, 2025.
"There has been a lot of manipulation of the case," Leo said. The sisters "have been victimized and revictimized," the pope said in a July interview for the book, Leo XIV: Citizen of the World, Missionary of the XXI Century.
Coronado-Arrascue has been trailed for years by controversy and accusations of sexual wrongdoing that ultimately got him defrocked and had his status as a canon lawyer revoked. The...