After Bishop Carlos Belo, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was accused of sexually abusing minors, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith instructed him “to keep a low profile, even while there was no public acknowledgment of the allegations he faced.”

“The Vatican instructions,” including an apparent lack of a canonical penal process, “bear some familiarity to the situation of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick,” according to the Pillar’s analysis of the case. “McCarrick faced Vatican restrictions in 2008, while Belo apparently received them in 2020. By then, everything was supposed to have changed.”