Archbishop Viganò claimed that the Vatican hierarchy was complicit in covering up accusations that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians and that Pope Francis knew about the abuses by the … American prelate years before they became public. Yet, … Francis did not punish the cardinal, but instead empowered him to help choose powerful American bishops. – Jason Horowitz
On the final day of Pope Francis’ mission to Ireland, as he issued wrenching apologies for clerical sex abuse scandals, a former top Vatican diplomat claimed in a letter published on Sunday that the pope himself had joined top Vatican officials in covering up the abuses and called for his resignation.
The letter (pdf), a bombshell written by Carlo Maria Viganò, the former top Vatican diplomat in the United States and a staunch critic of the pope’s, seemed timed to do more than simply derail Francis’ uphill efforts to win back the Irish faithful, who have turned away from the church in large numbers.
Its unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks amounted to an extraordinary public declaration of war against Francis’ papacy at perhaps its most vulnerable moment, intended to unseat a pope whose predecessor, Benedict XVI, was the first pontiff to resign in nearly 600 years.
Archbishop Viganò claimed that the Vatican hierarchy was complicit in covering up accusations that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians and that Pope Francis knew about the abuses by the now-disgraced American prelate years before they became public. Yet, the letter contended, Francis did not punish the cardinal, but instead empowered him to help choose powerful American bishops.
In a news conference on the papal plane back to Rome late Sunday evening, Francis was asked whether there was any truth to the claim that Archbishop Viganò had personally informed him in 2013 of Cardinal McCarrick’s history of abuse. He was also asked whether Benedict had sanctioned the American cardinal, as the letter also claimed.
The pope did not deny it, but sidestepped the questions by insisting he would not dignify them with a response.
“I will not say a single word about this,” he said. “I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have the sufficient journalistic ability to make your conclusions. It’s an act of trust.”
The 7,000-word attack on Francis’ allies in the Vatican, published early Sunday Dublin time by several conservative Catholic outlets antagonistic to the pope, represented a steep escalation in the longstanding, and increasingly caustic, rivalries within the church.
Factions have battled over the direction the church has gone under Francis, with conservatives, especially some American cardinals and bishops, warning that his pastoral and inclusive approach and emphasis on social issues dilute church doctrine and pose a mortal threat to the future of the faith.
Already on Sunday afternoon, the battle was being joined.
Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, who is aligned with Francis and was a target of Archbishop Viganò’s letter, said in a phone interview that he suspected English speakers had helped Archbishop Viganò write the letter. He called the pope “a man of integrity.”
“If he makes a mistake, he admits it,” Cardinal Cupich said. “That’s why I’m convinced this is something that he is going to respond to in an appropriate way.”
Cardinal Cupich also said the timing of the letter raised questions.
“I’d have to leave it up to him to ask him why he timed the release of this at this moment, particularly if he considered this information so very critical and important,” the cardinal said.
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia, a leading conservative voice in the Catholic Church, who according to the letter was disparaged by Francis, vouched for Archbishop Viganò’s integrity in a statement from his spokesman.
The willingness of the pope and his allies to reach out to gay Catholics has infuriated conservatives, many of whom, like Archbishop Viganò, blame homosexuals for the sex abuse crisis. The pope has argued that the abuse is a symptom of a culture of privilege and imperviousness among priests who value the church’s traditions over its parishioners.
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.
Archbishop Viganò said that Benedict had already punished Cardinal McCarrick for his abuse of seminarians and priests. The archbishop writes that Benedict had banned the American cardinal from publicly celebrating Mass, from living in a seminary and from travelling to give lectures.
There is no public record of such a sanction, and the cardinal continued to celebrate Mass. And in 2012, Cardinal McCarrick joined bishops in the Vatican to sing happy birthday to Benedict as they presented him with a fresh strawberry-and-kiwi custard cake.
Cardinal Cupich said he was not aware of any restrictions that Pope Benedict put on Cardinal McCarrick, as Archbishop Viganò asserts.
“How can you have secret restrictions? What does that mean?” Cardinal Cupich said, adding that it would have been Archbishop Viganò’s duty as nuncio to inform the American bishops of the restrictions. “Why didn’t he tell us this?” he asked. “Why didn’t he enforce it?”
Archbishop Viganò accused Francis of failing to apply the sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick and instead rehabilitating and entrusting him to help choose powerful American bishops, including Cardinal Cupich.
Archbishop Viganò despises many of those bishops, who now wield influence and promote Francis’ pastoral approach, and he complained in the letter of being deprived of the voice typically given to a papal nuncio in choosing them. He targeted those bishops and cardinals by name, but saved his strongest fire for Francis.
“He knew from at least June 23, 2013, that McCarrick was a serial predator,” Archbishop Viganò wrote.
“In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church,” he wrote, “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 him, saying his audience was “extremely nice, extremely warm.”
But in the letter, he said he had received an icy reception from 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, that they must not be left wing, “and when I say left-wing, I mean homosexual.”
It was then, he said, that Francis asked his opinion of Cardinal McCarrick.
“Holy Father,” Archbishop Viganò said he had responded, “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 gays for the child abuse crisis that has destroyed the church’s standing in many countries, dedicated 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, one of the traditional sources of power in the Vatican, 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 similar to mayor of Vatican City.
Benedict wanted him 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 Tarcisio Bertone, who instead echoed the articles’ complaints.
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 Benedict XVI’s resignation.
Francis removed Archbishop Viganò from his job as nuncio to the United States in 2016, in part for nearly ruining the pope’s trip to the United States by giving papal face time to Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Soon after his departure, a criminal investigation into an archbishop 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 prelate, Archbishop John C. Nienstedt.
Since his return to Rome, Archbishop Viganò has associated with traditionalist Catholics deeply critical of Pope Francis.
Archbishop Viganò’s letter, while especially inconvenient for the pope, who spent Sunday morning praying for abuse victims 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 that his predecessors in the Vatican’s embassy in Washington, now all 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.
Archbishop Viganò said that he had personally met with 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, he contacted Cardinal Parolin, the secretary of state and top adviser to Francis, in April 2014 inquiring whether the sanctions were still in force.
He said that neither 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.”
Ed McFadden, a spokesman for Cardinal Wuerl, disputed that account on Sunday. “In spite of what Archbishop Viganò’s memo indicates, Cardinal Wuerl did not receive any documentation or information during his time in Washington regarding any actions taken against Archbishop McCarrick,” Mr. McFadden said.
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.”
The controversy over the allegations is expected to grow in coming days, especially as Francis has declined to deny it.
Instead on Sunday’s flight, he blamed the media for promoting an “atmosphere of guilt” around suspected clerics and shared that until his visit he “had never heard” about Ireland’s notorious mother and baby homes, where children were ripped away from unwed mothers.
He also sought to strike the same conciliatory tone that hundreds of thousands of faithful heard earlier in the day as he began a Mass at Phoenix Park in Dublin by explicitly asking forgiveness for the church’s sins and abuse.
“Some members of the hierarchy didn’t own up to these painful situations,” he said at the Mass. “And kept silent.” – The New York Times, 26 August 2018
» Jason Horowitz is the Rome Bureau Chief of The New York Times. Elizabeth Dias contributed reporting from Washington, and Laurie Goodstein from New York.
Filed under: USA, vatican | Tagged: child sex abuse, church cover-up of sex abuse, pope francis, roman catholic church |
BHARATA BHARATI 
Archbishop who called on Pope to resign says corruption reaches the very top of the Vatican Curia – Philip Pullella – Reuters – Vatican City – 30 August 2018
The archbishop who sparked a crisis in the Catholic Church by calling on Pope Francis to resign has denied he was motivated by personal vendetta and said he sought to show that corruption had reached the top levels of the Church hierarchy.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano has gone into hiding since conservative media published an 11-page statement in which he alleged the pope knew for years about sexual misconduct by an American cardinal and did nothing about it.
Vigano has been communicating through Aldo Maria Valli, an Italian television journalist who Vigano consulted several times before releasing his statement last Sunday when the pope was in Ireland.
Italian media has reported he was upset because he was never made a cardinal by former Pope Benedict or because Francis blocked his further advancement in the Church.
“I have never had feelings of vendetta and rancour in all these years,” he was quoted as telling Valli, who has been publishing statements from Vigano in his blog.
“I spoke out because corruption has reached the top levels of Church hierarchy,” said Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador to Washington.
The Vatican had no comment on the new accusations by Vigano.
In his statement, Vigano accused a long list of current and past Vatican and U.S. Church officials of covering up the case of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned last month in disgrace.
One of the people he attacks in the statement is Cardinal Tarciscio Bertone, who was secretary of state under former Pope Benedict.
Italian media reports have said Vigano was upset because Bertone had blocked any possibility of him becoming a cardinal.
In his comments published on Valli’s blog, Vigano says he himself gave up the possibility of becoming a cardinal “for the good of the Church”.
Vigano did not include any supporting documents in his remarkably blunt statement in which he said cover-ups in the Church were making it look like “a conspiracy of silence not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia”.
On his flight home from Ireland on Sunday, Francis told reporters he would “not say one word” about the accusations.
“Read the document carefully and judge it for yourselves,” he said.
Francis’ supporters say the statement contains holes and contradictions and note that Vigano prepared it with help from two journalists who have been critical of Francis, citing this as evidence that it forms part of an ideological anti-Francis strategy. The journalists deny this.
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Will the Pope step down? – Neha Gokani – PGurus – Vatican City – 29 August 2018
Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro told to a news channel that the Vatican knew about a cover-up involving sexual abuse and has evidence of the Vatican having knowledge of the same. – Neha Gokani
There is a new controversy surfaced with the Vatican and this time it involves the “Pope” who is at receiving end. He is answerable on the allegation for not acting on the Jury report and a letter from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano accusing the Vatican for not acting against the offenders.
Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro told to a news channel that the Vatican knew about a cover-up involving sexual abuse and has evidence of the Vatican having knowledge of the same. However, he has not confirmed what exactly is the evidence that proves the Vatican was aware of the cover-up.
Hundreds of priests from six Pennsylvanian districts are reportedly involved in abusing children for last seven decades and these allegations have come forth, two weeks after the release of grand jury report.
There is a widespread cover-up revealed in the Grand Jury’s investigation report into abuse and another interesting fact which they have established is that of a systematic cover-up which went up till the Vatican. It is reported that the 23 grand jurors met for two years and “unearthed over 301 predator priests (and) more than a thousand victims — children in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro told “Today.”[1]
There are more than 730 calls received on Pennsylvania’s clergy abuse hotline since the grand jury report has been released. However, it is unclear that how many of these cases (if any) could still be prosecuted and the number of calls highlights the impact on victims who have suffered over the years.
The Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano who served as the Vatican Ambassador to the United States from 2006 to 2011, has released an 11-page document on Sunday to Catholic Media group. In this letter, he has accused Pope Francis of ignoring sexual abuse accusation against former cardinal McCarrick of United State in June 2013. For all these years there was no action taken against him despite knowing his involvement in the sexual abuse case. It is only last month that McCarrick resigned after the evidence was released that he had molested an altar child.
This letter which was released during Pope Francis’ visit to Dublin, Ireland, where he addressed the crowd (on Sunday 26th Aug 2018) and read out the letter from former Vatican official which calls for his resignation. However, he started his service by apologizing for the scandal and the betrayal felt by the victims.
The Pope also told reporters that, he would not say a single word about the contents of the letter and the letter speaks for itself. [2]
After the apology by Pope on Sunday, Vigano wrote “Apology is not enough”, there must be action taken against people who covered up, irrespective of the position held and set a good example and ensure zero tolerance.
With these allegations coming to light, Vatican office needs to come clean on the actions being taken by them on church leaders. Will the Pope himself take the moral responsibility and resign for not acting against all the priests’ who were involved in sexual abuse as well as priests who were covering up?
References:
[1] AG Claims the vatican knew about cover up – CNN.com
[2] Pope, I will not say a single word – Voanews.com
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If a former top Vatican diplomat in the United States has found the courage to name names and speak out, we wait for an Indian Catholic prelate to do the same.
Or do we wait in vain?
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