The Catholics who would still go to church after this news are part of the problem.
The Catholic Church needs to be destroyed.
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Wall Street Journal:
A former papal ambassador to the U.S. has claimed that Pope Francis knew as early as 2013 about charges that the former archbishop of Washington, ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, had been sexually active with seminarians and priests.
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“In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them.”
New York Times - Pope Francis Long Knew of Cardinal McCarrick’s Abuses, Archbishop Says
By Jason Horowitz
August 26, 2018
DUBLIN — The former top Vatican diplomat in the United States alleged in a letter published on Sunday that Pope Francis knew about the abuses of a now-disgraced American prelate years before they became public.
The bombshell accusation, leveled by Carlo Maria Viganò, a staunch critic of Francis, immediately threatened to derail the pope’s difficult mission to demonstrate his commitment to combating the clerical sex abuse scandals that threaten his church on the same day he begged “the Lord’s forgiveness” at a shrine in Ireland.
Instead, Francis and several other top-ranking Vatican officials were now accused of being part of the cover-ups as Archbishop Viganò called for their resignations.
The Vatican had no immediate reaction to the letter.
In a detailed, 7,000-word letter published Sunday morning by several conservative Catholic outlets antagonistic to Francis, including The National Catholic Register and Lifesite News, Archbishop Viganò alleges that much of the Vatican hierarchy was complicit in covering up accusations that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians.
Last month, Francis accepted the resignation of Cardinal McCarrick, the first such resignation in living memory, after The New York Times and other news outlets published accounts of the alleged abuse and an internal investigation by the American church deemed credible an accusation that he had sexually abused a minor.
But Archbishop Viganò alleges that Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, had already punished Cardinal McCarrick for his abuse of seminarians and priests. The archbishop writes that Benedict banned the American cardinal from publicly celebrating Mass, living in a seminary and traveling to give lectures.
The National Catholic Register, which has been a preferred platform for some of Francis’ most aggressive critics, reported that it had independently confirmed the allegations, but it did not publish any on-the-record corroboration and asserted, without attribution, that Pope Benedict “remembers” telling his second-in-command, Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, “to impose measures but cannot recall their exact nature.”
Cardinal McCarrick led several public Masses throughout Benedict’s papacy, but Archbishop Viganò alleges that the penalties were known about within the hierarchy and that he had personally informed Francis of them in June 2013.
He said that Francis had failed to apply the sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick and had instead rehabilitated and empowered him to help choose powerful American bishops. Archbishop Viganò despises those bishops, and he complained in the letter of being deprived the voice typically given to a papal nuncio in choosing them.
“He knew from at least June 23, 2013, that McCarrick was a serial predator,” Archbishop Viganò writes of Francis, calling for the pope’s resignation.
“In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them.”
At a 2013 reception in the library of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican shortly after Francis was elected pope, Archbishop Viganò was effusive with praise for Francis, calling him “a man you may talk to with an open heart” and saying his audience was “extremely nice, extremely warm.”
But in the letter, he said he had received an icy reception from Pope Francis. And he said the pope had told him on June 23, 2013: “The bishops in the United States must not be ideologized, they must not be right-wing.” Francis then added, according to Archbishop Viganò, “They must not be left-wing, and when I say left-wing I mean homosexual.”
It was then that Francis asked his opinion of Cardinal McCarrick, to which Archbishop Viganò said he had replied: “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.”
Archbishop Viganò, who blames homosexuals for the child abuse crisis that has destroyed the church’s standing in many countries, dedicates entire sections of the letter to outing cardinals who he claims belong to what he characterizes as a pernicious “homosexual current” within the Vatican.
“These homosexual networks,” he wrote, “which are now widespread in many dioceses, seminaries, religious orders, etc., act under the concealment of secrecy and lies with the power of octopus tentacles, and strangle innocent victims and priestly vocations, and are strangling the entire church.”
Archbishop Viganò is no stranger to stirring trouble in the Vatican.
A cultural conservative born into a wealthy family in Varese, Italy, he received the title of archbishop from Pope John Paul II in 1992. He later joined the church’s diplomatic corps, which is one of the traditional sources of power in the Vatican, and which gave him access to much of the information he alleges in the letter. In 2009, he was installed by Pope Benedict XVI as secretary of the governorate of Vatican City State, a position not unlike the mayor of Vatican City.
Benedict wanted the ambitious Italian with a taste for good red wine to enact government overhauls, but Archbishop Viganò’s efforts in pursuit of that goal earned him powerful enemies.
In early 2011, hostile anonymous articles attacking Archbishop Viganò began appearing in the Italian news media, the bulletin board of Vatican power politics. Archbishop Viganò appealed to Benedict’s second in command, Cardinal Bertone, who instead echoed the articles’ complaints about his rough management style and removed Archbishop Viganò from his post.
Those appeals and protests, later leaked by the pope’s butler, became the heart of the church scandal known as VatiLeaks, which many church observers say contributed to the resignation of Benedict XVI.
Francis removed Archbishop Viganò from his job as nuncio to the United States in 2016, in part for nearly ruining the pope’s trip the United States by giving papal face time to Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk whose refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Soon after his departure, a criminal investigation into a bishop in Minneapolis-St. Paul revealed a memo that Archbishop Viganò had written in 2014 in an effort to suppress a church investigation into alleged homosexual activity by the Minnesota bishop.
Since his return to Rome, Archbishop Viganò has run with a crowd of traditionalist Catholics deeply critical of Pope Francis and recently attended a raucous meeting of anti-Francis prelates and faithful in the basement of a Rome hotel, where he could be seen talking to the Lifesite news reporter who translated the letter into English.
Archbishop Viganò’s extensive letter, while especially inconvenient for the pope, who spent the morning praying for abuse victims in at a shrine in Knock, Ireland, also goes after a broad array of current and past Vatican officials and American prelates. He names all of them.
He said his predecessors in the Vatican’s embassy in Washington, now deceased, knew about Cardinal McCarrick’s alleged relationships with seminarians and priests and had reported it to the Vatican but that successive secretaries of state — Angelo Sodano, Cardinal Bertone and Pietro Parolin — did nothing.
He said he wrote another memo in 2006 about new allegations against Cardinal McCarrick and delivered it in December of that year to his superior with recommendations to strip the cardinal of his rank and defrock him before he brought scandal to the church.
He alleges that he delivered another memo in May 2008 that also went nowhere, but then writes that he learned through another cardinal that Pope Benedict had at a certain point imposed sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick.
He blamed Cardinal Bertone, his old rival, for the delay.
Archbishop Viganò said that he had personally met with then-Cardinal McCarrick to remind him that he was under sanction during their first meeting after he arrived in the United States.
“The cardinal, muttering in a barely comprehensible way, admitted that he had perhaps made the mistake of sleeping in the same bed with some seminarians at his beach house,” he writes.
After bumping into Cardinal McCarrick at the pope’s residence in the Vatican, and listening to the American boast about his freedom to travel, Archbishop Viganò wrote that he contacted Cardinal Parolin, the secretary of state and top adviser to Francis, in April 2014 inquiring if the sanctions were still in force.
He said Cardinal Parolin nor a host of other Vatican officials had replied, but that when he had brought up the subject with Cardinal McCarrick’s replacement in Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, “it was immediately clear to me that he was fully aware of it.”
“In spite of what Archbishop Viganó’s memo indicates, Cardinal Wuerl did not receive any documentation or information during his time in Washington regarding any actions taken against Archbishop McCarrick.” Ed McFadden, a spokesman for Cardinal Wuerl, said Sunday.
Some survivors of clerical abuse called the allegations a distraction.
“This is infighting between curia factions that are exploiting the abuse crisis and victims of clergy sexual abuse as leverage in the struggle for church power,” said Peter Isely, a survivor. “The sexual abuse crisis is not about whether a bishop is a liberal or a conservative. It is about protecting children.”
But the controversy over the letter is expected to grow in the coming days, and it is likely to require a response from Francis, who is to return to the Vatican on Sunday evening after celebrating Mass at Phoenix Park in Dublin.
“None of us can fail to be moved by the stories of young people who suffered abuse, were robbed of their innocence, who were taken from their mothers, and left scarred by painful memories,” Francis said on Sunday after praying quietly for abuse survivors at a shrine to the Virgin Mary in Knock.
“This open wound challenges us to be firm and decisive in the pursuit of truth and justice,” he said. “I beg the Lord’s forgiveness for these sins and for the scandal and betrayal felt by so many others in God’s family."
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| A protest in Dublin on Sunday during Francis’ visit. |
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