DR1 Daily News - Dominican Republic

The recent Vatican intervention in the Archdiocese of Santo Domingo has laid bare a long-festering crisis of transparency within the Dominican Republic’s most powerful religious institution. The effective removal of Metropolitan Archbishop Francisco Ozoria Acosta from administrative and financial governance, relegating him to a largely ceremonial role, is being viewed by observers not as an isolated scandal, but as the inevitable collapse of a system long protected by institutional silence and a lack of external oversight. Ozoria has yet to reach the retirement age of 75 years in October of this year.

A culture of institutional silenceFor years, allegations of mismanagement and irregularities within the archdiocese remained a matter of vox populi, widely discussed in private and local media but met with persistent silence from the Church hierarchy. It was only after reports of...