Cipriani attended the Colegio Santa Maria Marianistas, a Catholic school, and as a young man he was a member of the Peruvian national basketball team for six years.

He did pastoral work in Lima, taught at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology, and was regional vicar for Peru and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Piura.

"[5] In 1995, he backed legislation to shield the Peruvian military and police from prosecution for activities undertaken as part of the suppression of radical movements.

[6] Cipriani was chancellor of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) in 1997 when it barred a gay student organisation, Parenthesis Collective (Colectivo Paréntesis), from holding events.

[3] Cipriani was made Cardinal-Priest of San Camillo de Lellis by Pope John Paul II in the consistory of 21 February 2001.

He called it "an old strategy" that "starts by putting the shoe on the door with this law, and ends up asking for marriage between homosexuals".

[15] On 19 July 2011, he was named a member of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America by Pope Benedict XVI.

[16] From 2007 to 2016, he fought with the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, which resisted his attempts to assert control over its financial and academic affairs.

The Archdiocese responded to widespread criticism of that statement by explaining that Castillo was characterizing the immodest presentation of women on television.

Cipriani was later criticized for neglecting reports of sexual abuse which had been made against members of the Catholic church's Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae society.

[23] The sex abuse case against the Sodalitium would not even move forward until journalists Pedro Salinas and Paola Ugaz exposed the practices of Sodalitium in their 2015 book “Half Monks, Half Soldiers.”[23] Speaking to the Associated Press on 25 January 2025, Escardó stated that “Cardinal Cipriani was the Opus Dei cardinal that Sodalitium needed.”[23] On 25 January 2025, Cipriani made public that the Vatican had sanctioned him since 2019 following allegations that he committed an act of sexual abuse in 1983.

However, Cipriani denies any wrongdoing, "I haven’t committed any crime, nor have I sexually abused anyone in 1983, neither before nor after", and called the allegations completely false.

Its Final Report identified Cipriani as the only religious leader that did not support the work of Peru's Human Rights Coordinator, "whose activities he repeatedly pronounced himself in opposition to".

[26] The Commission wrote: "Every day people disappeared in Ayacucho in those years, it was a very serious problem, as well as torture and murder, but Mgr.

Let's put it briefly: Most institutions called "human rights defense" are the backbones of political movements, almost always of the Marxist and Maoist type".