(LifeSiteNews) — A cardinal known for defending homosexual “blessings” and promoting “synodality” has stepped down from public ministry temporarily after five women accused him of sexual assault.
Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero, SDB, the Spanish-born archbishop of Rabat, Morocco, announced his decision in a statement published by Vatican News.
Romero, 74, “will refrain from presiding over public celebrations and participating in pastoral activities” during a “preliminary Church investigation,” according to Vatican News.
The cardinal, a close ally of the late Pope Francis, said that he faces allegations of “inappropriate behavior toward adult women.” He denied the accusations, telling AFP that he had committed “no assault, no violence, and no sexual harassment.”
Cardinal defended Fiducia Supplicans, breaking with African bishops
Romero is a notable supporter of Fiducia Supplicans, the 2023 document approved by Pope Francis that backs “blessings” for homosexual “couples” and other people in “irregular situations,” i.e., adultery or fornication.
In January 2024, Romero issued a communiqué as the head of the North African bishops’ conference defending Fiducia and breaking with bishops across Africa who had denounced the document and homosexual “blessings.”
Romero’s communiqué praised Fiducia as “an invitation to reread and evaluate our ecclesial practice of discernment, to deepen the concrete paths of a pastoral approach to reconciliation and communion.”
The communiqué endorsed homosexual “blessings,” saying, “When individuals in irregular situations come together to request a blessing, it may be given, provided that this does not cause confusion for those concerned or for others.”
It also decried the purported “risk of entrenched positions” about Fiducia that it claimed “could jeopardize the unity of the Church” and added that “the subject deserves to be re-examined in a calm manner within the framework of the synodal dynamic currently underway in the universal Church.”
Romero’s statement came in response to a letter from the president of the continental association of African bishops’ conferences, Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, opposing homosexual “blessings.”
The liberal Moroccan prelate criticized Cardinal Ambongo for releasing a statement before the North African bishops did.
“Learning synodality is not a simple thing,” Romero said. “We are going to have to overcome many setbacks and many moments in which we will have to ask for forgiveness, just as the president of the African bishops asked forgiveness for making a statement without waiting for us make to one.”
Like Romero, all of the North African bishops – who preside over small Catholic populations in Muslim-dominated countries – are European.
Romero also accused opponents of Fiducia of “homophobia” and called for the eradication of “this or similar attitudes.”
“Could it not be that, at the root of some or many of the most furious reactions against the possibility of blessing same-sex couples, there are vestiges of homophobia?” he said in an essay shortly after the release of the North African bishops’ communiqué.
“Wouldn’t it be better for us to go, in a humble attitude, to ask for a blessing to help us get rid of this or similar attitudes?” he wrote.
“We cannot continue living either in homophobia or in denial of the existence of homosexuality,” the cardinal continued.
Strong backer of Pope Francis, claimed ‘no religion possesses the truth’
Romero is a particularly strong proponent of Pope Francis’ agenda, saying, “I’m fully in tune with everything Francis proposed—his way of acting, speaking, and leading.”
“Francis helped me reconnect with both the Gospel and tradition. And by tradition, I mean not the 19th century, but the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries,” he added.
“For me, Pope Francis was like a father, a pastoral model, and a friend who knew me,” he said.
Francis named Romero the archbishop of Rabat in 2017 and made him a cardinal in 2019.
An advocate of Pope Francis’ idea of “synodality,” Romero hailed the concept as a “prophetic sign that may illuminate the world.” He attended the Synod on Synodality and claimed that even those who oppose decisions resulting from the synod “are morally obligated” to support them.
Last year, the prelate scandalously also claimed that “We must abandon the false paradigm of ‘true religion, false religion.’”
“Religions, for their part, have the responsibility to offer paths of meaning and truth, not of domination,” he wrote in an article for L’Osservatore Romano in October. “No religion can appropriate the truth, as if it were its sole owner. No religion possesses the truth; if anything, it is the truth that possesses us all, and in every religion there are glimmers of truth.”
In 2022, he said that migration “should be seen as a reality or a social phenomenon, not as a problem.”
Like Popes Francis and Leo XIV, Romero has criticized conservative immigration policies, including in the United States.
“These rich countries want to lock themselves into their well-being and do not want to be disturbed,” he said. “The United States is building a physical wall; Europe is building an administrative and political wall.”