In a sharply-worded letter last week, the Vatican's delegate to the Institute of the Incarnate Word accused members of resisting the Institute’s reform, and suggested that defiance could lead to dissolution of the religious order.
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“I am encountering strong resistance to admitting something obvious: the Institute of the Incarnate Word, like any ecclesial institution and like the Church itself— semper reformanda —must recognize the harm caused by some of its members and certain dynamics—internal and external—that do not reflect the style of Jesus Christ,” wrote Bishop José Satué, appointed by the Vatican to oversee reforms in the embattled Argentinian congregation.
In a March 25 letter, the bishop added that the institute’s leadership has failed to acknowledge troubling issues in its life and governance, including past sexual abuse by its founder, Fr. Carlos Buela.
The warning came two months after the Vatican imposed a moratorium on new members for the men’s and women’s religious communities, citing “severe deficits” in formation, governance, and government—and echoing recent cases in which religious congregations with embattled founders have been dissolved by the Vatican.
The Religious Family of the Incarnate Word, founded in Argentina in 1984, consists of a male branch called the Institute of the Incarnate Word (IVE), a female branch known as the Servants of the Lord and the Virgin of Matará, a secular third order, and contemplative branches.
Satué wrote his letter on the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, which is also the IVE’s foundation anniversary.
Satué started his letter by thanking the IVE’s leadership for their missionary work.
“During these two months and a half, I have been able to sense in your communities… the sincere desire to follow Jesus Christ, the decisive will to transmit his love and his word, the availability to go on mission in the most complicated places, as your austerity and capacity for self-abnegation,” the letter says.
“It is impossible to deny the immense good that the Institute does in yourselves, in your families, and in the people you work with in so many places of the world, in so many peripheries,” Satué added.
But despite his praise for the IVE, Satué wrote that its authorities have not collaborated with him and has not grappled with its founder’s abuse — nor that of other members of the IVE.
“We can only move forward with an attitude of sincere conversion. Remember that ‘what is not assumed, is not redeemed,’ as Saint Irenaeus of Lyon teaches and you preach so many times,” the bishop wrote.
Satué’s letter seemed to refer to a lack of collaboration denounced by previous Vatican-appointed pontifical delegates or commissioners over the IVE.
In 2010, the then-Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life published a decree ordering the “removal of Fr. Carlos Buela from the office of Superior General of the Institute of the Incarnate Word.”
It also obliged Buela to “reside, until further orders, away from the own Institute, in the [French] Abbey La Pierre Qui Vire under the authority of the Abbot who can regulate its contacts with the members of the Institute of the Incarnate Word” due to “inappropriate behavior with young adult members of the Institute.”
These sanctions were allegedly largely ignored, which prompted the pope to appoint Spanish Cardinal Santos Abril as pontifical commissary of the male branch in 2019.
In 2021, a special canonical tribunal, constituted by Abril, concluded that Buela had committed grave crimes against the Sixth Commandment using violence against five members and former members of the Institute.
Buela appealed the decision, but died in April 2023, before a final decision could be issued.
Abril repeatedly cited a lack of cooperation from members in the IVE and, in a 2022 letter, said the former superior general, Fr. Gustavo Nieto, had created a “shadow government, as it had happened with all former commissaries.”
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In his letter last week, Satué added that “At many times, I have had the feeling that the love for the Institute is so big that it does not allow you to acknowledge concrete elements in which a need for reform is evidenced.”
“I will not ask you to love the Institute less, on the contrary! I ask you to love it more and better, with eyes more open, to identify both the good and the evil,” he said.
Satué closed the letter in what seemed to be a veiled threat of a suppression of the IVE should it oppose the Vatican-ordered reform:
“It would be a pity if the resistance to recognize mistakes were to spoil the great good that has been done.”
The Vatican has recently suppressed two other relatively young Latin American congregations with controversial founders this year: Sodalitium Christianae Vitae and Miles Christi.
On January 20, the Vatican announced the dissolution of the Sodalitium, founded in Peru in 1971.
In 2011 and 2013, allegations that Figari had sexually abused minors and adults had been received by the Archdiocese of Lima. The publication of a 2015 book, “Half Monks, Half Soldiers” sparked broader criticism of the organization, with more allegations against Figari, and the claim that the group’s approach to formation and obedience was coercive, manipulative, or abusive.
Meanwhile, the suppression of the clerical religious institute Miles Christi was announced by the Argentine bishops’ conference on March 6.
Miles Christi was founded by the now-laicized Fr. Roberto Yannuzzi in 1994, as an association of clerics in the Archdiocese of La Plata, Argentina. From its beginning, the institute’s critics, and former members, said that recruitment efforts were coercive, and that formation methodology was psychologically abusive and sometimes degrading.
In 2016, the Archdiocese of La Plata began a canonical investigation into its founder, after members of the institute alleged sexual abuse and abuses of authority, and that Yannuzzi had attempted to absolve sacramentally men with whom he had seemingly engaged in coercive sexual behavior — a move which can result in a declared excommunication, and is handled canonically by Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Despite the Holy See’s measures against the IVE, including the possibility of its dissolution, Pope Francis seems to have a personal liking for the missionary activity of the institute, which was founded in his native Argentina.
During his trip to Papua New Guinea, Francis visited IVE missionaries living in remote areas of the island. He also speaks daily with the Gaza parish priest, Argentinian Gabriel Romanelli, a member of the IVE.
In January, ahead of the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state of the Holy See, consecrated a landmark new church to commemorate Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan – and the church was entrusted to priests of the IVE.
