ORAN, Argentina -- The Vatican received information in 2015 and 2017 that an Argentine bishop close to Pope Francis had been accused of misconduct with seminarians, his former vicar general told The Associated Press.
The information that Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta had taken naked selfies and exhibited "obscene" behavior undermines Vatican claims that allegations of sexual abuse were only made a few months ago.
Francis accepted Zanchetta's resignation in August 2017 after priests in the remote northern Argentine diocese of Oran complained about his authoritarian rule. A former vicar, seminary rector and another prelate provided reports to the Vatican alleging abuses of power, inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment of adult seminarians, said the former vicar, the Rev. Juan Jose Manzano.
The scandal over Zanchetta, 54, is the latest to implicate Francis as he and the Catholic hierarchy as a whole face an unprecedented crisis of confidence over their mishandling of cases of clergy sexual abuse of minors and misconduct with adults. Francis has summoned church leaders to a meeting next month to chart the course forward for the universal church, but his own actions in individual cases are increasingly in the spotlight.
Manzano, Zanchetta's onetime vicar general, or top deputy, said he was one of the diocesan officials who raised the alarm about his boss in 2015 and sent the digital selfies to the Vatican.
In an interview in the pews of his St. Cayetano parish in Oran, Manzano said he was one of the three current and former diocesan officials who made a second complaint to the Vatican's Embassy in Buenos Aires in May or June of 2017 "when the situation was much more serious, not just because there had been a question about sexual abuses, but because the diocese was increasingly heading into the abyss."
Francis had sent Zanchetta to Oran, a city some 1,025 miles northwest of Buenos Aires in Salta province, in 2013 in one of his first Argentine bishop appointments as pope. He knew Zanchetta well; Zanchetta had been the executive undersecretary of the Argentine bishops conference, which the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio headed for two successive terms, from 2005-2011.
Manzano said Bergoglio had been Zanchetta's confessor and treated him as a "spiritual son."
Francis named Zanchetta to Oran despite complaints about alleged abuses of power when Zanchetta was in charge of economic affairs in his home diocese of Quilmes, which is in the ecclesial province of Buenos Aires which Bergoglio headed.
Earlier this month, the Vatican confirmed that the new bishop of Oran had opened a preliminary canonical investigation into Zanchetta for reports of sexual abuse. But Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti stressed in a Jan. 3 statement that the abuse allegations had only emerged at the end of 2018, after Zanchetta's resignation and nearly a year after Francis created a new position for him at the Vatican.
At the time of his resignation, Zanchetta had only asked Francis to let him leave Oran because he had difficult relations with its priests and was "unable to govern the clergy," Gisotti said in the statement.
"At the time of his resignation there were accusations against him of authoritarianism, but there were no accusations of sexual abuse against him," the statement said.
Zanchetta had largely disappeared from public view until the Vatican, in an official announcement Dec. 19, 2017, said Francis had named him to the new position of "assessor" in the Vatican's financial management office, a key administrative department that manages the Holy See's real estate and financial holdings. While the Vatican's annual yearbook lists Zanchetta hierarchically as the top deputy to the president of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, his exact duties were never clear because the job didn't previously exist.
Information for this article was contributed by Silvia Noviasky of Argentina's El Tribuno.
A Section on 01/21/2019