 According to Church law, a confessor has an absolute duty not to disclose anything that he might have learned from a penitent in the course of a confession (see Seal of the Confessional in the Catholic Church).In his vote, which its own contents date to August 1989, De Magistris argued that the testimony from the main witness, Álvaro del Portillo, should have been entirely excluded from the proceedings, since Portillo had been Escrivá's confessor for 31 years.John Allen Jr. comments that, according to some observers within the Catholic church, De Magistris was punished for his opposition to Escrivá's canonization.