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By Root 1408 0

challenged the bishop of Tucson when he was suspended for transgressions with youths. A canonist, Trupia filed an appeal at Clergy charging that Bishop Manuel Moreno’s investigation was flawed—Moreno had prejudged him. Trupia wrote to Moreno, calling himself a “loose cannon,” threatening to reveal that he had had a sexual relationship with a deceased bishop, that the two of them and a third priest had had sex with a teenage drug addict. In exchange for his silence, Trupia, then forty-two, proposed to retire with a pension in good standing. Moreno asked him to enter a mental hospital. Under Castrillón’s predecessor, Clergy softened the bishop’s order to an administrative leave. Trupia appealed to the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican equivalent of the Supreme Court. Moreno hired a canonist in Rome to represent his position. As Clergy’s newly minted prefect, Castrillón (himself a canonist) asserted his authority in a December 13, 1996, letter to Moreno requesting that he “resolve this matter by means of a ‘reasonable solution.’ ”13

We strongly urge Your Excellency to enter into meaningful dialogue with Monsignor Trupia regarding the terms of solution he has proposed. In so doing, Your Excellency would also be well advised … that the matter of damages is not outside of the purview of any subsequent decision which may be rendered.

Moreno wrote to Castrillón: “we consider [Trupia’s stance] damaging to the faithful as well as to his ‘victims’ of the past … we cannot let Monsignor Trupia ‘loose’ if we do not know whether he is respectful and faithful to the priesthood.” Castrillón replied on October 31, 1997: “Concerning damages arising from the imposition of an illegitimate decree, it is the mind of this [Congregation] that Your Excellency is liable for these from 2 June 1996 onwards. It would appear best that this matter … be resolved in an equitable fashion”—meaning Moreno should provide a package for Trupia to retire in good standing. Castrillón also wanted Moreno to reimburse Trupia’s legal expenses and suggested using him as a canon law consultant! Bishop Moreno in his return letter to Castrillón evinces an understandable frustration:

As I informed the Congregation last week, we have now been served with a lawsuit concerning actions of Msgr. Trupia in the mid 1970s concerning a then minor altar boy. These risks are not just imaginary, but real.

I am at a loss to deal with the finding of the Congregation concerning damages. I have paid Msgr. Trupia full salary plus his medical and car insurance at all times, as the Congregation was so informed. I have been given no details so that we can even defend what other damages may have arisen.

Msgr. Trupia has resigned his office and has no right to it.

I have deep respect for the works of the Congregation for the Clergy, however, I have appealed the decision to the Signatura in this matter.

“When I saw those documents,” recalls attorney Lynne Cadigan of Tucson, who had several clients abused by Trupia, “I thought, This is a gold mine. I know that sounds terrible, but within the confines of the clerical world, Moreno was trying hard to prevent scandal and Castrillón showed the depth of the corruption.”14 Trupia left Tucson with a tidy $1,475 monthly check and found a condo outside Washington, D.C. He landed consulting work as a canon lawyer for the Monterey, California, diocese—until the lawsuits in Arizona made him toxic. With Castrillón’s letter as a proverbial smoking gun, Cadigan bargained a $14 million settlement for Trupia’s victims. When, finally, the Vatican defrocked Trupia in 2004, the Tucson diocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the face of claims from thirty-three other victims, most of them from a second priest. The diocese eventually settled those for $22 million.15

On the day of the 2002 emergency meeting in the Vatican, it is unlikely the other cardinals knew about Castrillón’s fiasco with Trupia. (Michael Rezendes’s Boston Globe report on Trupia would come four months later.) But Italians in the room knew that in America huge