Archbishop Viganò’s claims urgently
demand a full investigation
If access to key McCarrick-related documents and witnesses is restricted,
the faithful have the capacity to draw their own conclusions
The Editors
September 7, 2018
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s bombshell “testimony” claiming that Pope Francis knew about allegations of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s sexual misconduct but still chose to make him a trusted adviser has placed the Holy See squarely in the spotlight of the widening Church crisis over the mishandling of clergy sexual abuse.
Archbishop Viganò’s testimony has been framed by some as an unwarranted act of aggression on a sitting pope. No doubt, the very public nature of Archbishop Viganò’s unsubstantiated allegations against Francis and other Vatican officials, whom he identifies by name and claims were complicit in suppressing accusations against McCarrick, is unprecedented in Church history.
Yet the author of the testimony is a retired senior Vatican official with detailed inside knowledge of Rome’s internal workings and an experienced diplomat who served as U.S. papal nuncio from 2011 to 2016.
Now, he has taken the irrevocable step of indicting an ecclesial culture that, until recently, accorded him enormous standing.
Thus far, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, along with more than 30 other bishops, has recognized that the charges leveled in the extraordinary letter of the former apostolic nuncio to the United States must be taken seriously and investigated promptly.
“The questions raised deserve answers that are conclusive and based on evidence,” said Cardinal DiNardo. “Without those answers, innocent men may be tainted by false accusation and the guilty may be left to repeat sins of the past.”
In the wake of previous revelations that Archbishop McCarrick had been appointed the archbishop of Washington in 2000 and remained in his post for six years, despite repeated efforts by whistleblowers to alert Rome about allegations of his sexual misconduct involving seminarians and priests, the USCCB’s leadership had already committed to plans for an independent investigation.
This work is expected to involve the collaboration of Vatican and U.S. Church leaders, with a prominent role for lay specialists. These preparations took on more urgency amid gruesome headlines prompted by the Pennsylvania grand jury report, which found that 300 priests had been accused of abusing 1,000 children in six dioceses over more than half a century and contended that the bishops in those dioceses at the time proceeded to cover it up.
Now, attention has centered on Archbishop Viganò’s assertion that Pope Francis knew in 2013 that Archbishop McCarrick faced allegations of sexual misconduct, yet lifted sanctions privately imposed by Pope Benedict XVI and granted him a key advisory role.
The Pope has not yet offered a substantive response to the allegations. “I will not say a single word about this,” he said during an in-flight Aug. 26 news conference as he returned from the World Meeting of Families in Dublin, one day after Archbishop Viganò’s testimony was published. “I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have the journalistic capacity to draw your own conclusions.”
The Holy Father’s reluctance to respond to the allegations could stem from a sure knowledge that they are substantially untrue, at least with respect to his own conduct, and a belief that journalistic investigation is the preferred way to establish this factually without violating the confidentiality of sensitive Vatican files.
But without an official investigation authorized by the Pope himself, it’s simply impossible to discredit the claims. Indeed, one key element — that Pope Benedict imposed some sort of restriction on Archbishop McCarrick because of the Vatican’s knowledge of his sexual misconduct with adult seminarians and priests — has been partially validated to the Register by a source close to the pope emeritus.
At the same time, what the source described to the Register seemed to fall substantially short of the canonical “sanctions” that Archbishop Viganò insisted Benedict had mandated for the disgraced archbishop.
Archbishop Viganò’s fiercest media critics have latched onto this point of contention, along with other confusing or apparently contradictory aspects of his testimony, to cast doubt on both the integrity of the messenger and the claims embedded in his letter.
In addition, reporters have pointed to previous charges accusing the former nuncio of obstructing a 2014 investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Archbishop Viganò vehemently denied those charges subsequent to publication of his testimony, and Auxiliary Bishop Andrew Cozzens of St. Paul and Minneapolis, who was involved closely with the 2014 investigation, seems to have acknowledged Archbishop Viganò’s key points.
In reality, though, journalistic sleuthing can only go so far, at least in these special circumstances.
An official investigation is urgently needed in order to provide a comprehensive review of all the complicated facts in the story of Archbishop McCarrick’s rise and fall.
- The investigators must be charged with authority to review the Vatican and U.S. nunciature’s archives, where the critical documents validating these claims can be found, according to Archbishop Viganò.
- The investigators also must be given permission to interview every senior Church leader with knowledge of Archbishop McCarrick’s misconduct and Pope Benedict’s response to it.
The most contentious aspect of the former nuncio’s testimony — his assertion that the Pope should resign — is a much more complex matter. Many faithful Catholics are understandably dismayed that the question of a papal resignation has even been raised without clear substantiation of the accusations. Even if an investigation should substantiate the majority of the archbishop’s claims, Church history and tradition are not clear on what should happen next.
What is most critical, at present, is for Pope Francis to move beyond his initial response to Archbishop Viganò’s testimony and offer a substantive message that matches the gravity of charges that have grieved the faithful.
On a practical level, the Pope’s decision to remain silent, combined with a series of “no comments” from Vatican authorities contacted by journalists, has constrained the work of reporters eager to vet Archbishop Viganò’s claims.
Even the most resourceful journalistic investigation will fall short without access to relevant documents and critical witnesses.
Cardinal DiNardo is right about the need for an evidence-based investigation. He has sought to meet immediately with Pope Francis in Rome to discuss this grave crisis.
[There are reports that Cardinal DiNardo first asked for such a meeting as early as July 20, when the revelations were published about McCarrick, and reiterated it after the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was published, but DiNardo's office claims there has been no response from the Vatican.]*
We pray that the meeting takes place, that the resolve of both the Holy Father and the U.S. bishops will be clear, and that a full investigation will be forthcoming.
Only with the Vatican’s cooperation will we see the documents that can prove or disprove Archbishop Viganò’s accusations. And only then will other Church authorities come forward and tell what they know.
Catholics, in the U.S. and in the universal Church, need to know the full truth. And until it is provided, the process of healing the wounds from the clerical crimes of the past and instituting the measures required to prevent their recurrence will be unacceptably impaired.
*
The hunt for Viganò:
Vatican spies tracking him down
By Rev. Michael X., JCL
September 7, 2018
According to sources within the Vatican, the Secretariat of State of the Holy See — under the direction of Pietro Cardinal Parolin — has communicated an instruction to its internal and external security services to use its "intelligence resources" to locate the physical whereabouts of Abp. Viganò.
This request has been communicated not only in order to prevent more unpredictable damage to the image of Pope Francis and the Holy See on the world stage, but also to "prepare the terrain" for the former apostolic nuncio-turned-whistleblower to be prosecuted for alleged multiple crimes against Vatican and Church law.
The urgency with which the location of Abp. Viganò is being sought is all the more palpable since, according to canon 1507 of the Code of Canon Law and other procedural and penal norms of the Holy See and Vatican City State,
Abp. Viganò cannot be prosecuted or even punished unless he first be given the opportunity to be officially notified in writing of the specific canonical and Vatican crimes he is alleged to have committed and be given the opportunity to defend himself against them.
As first reported by the very well-informed Roberto de Mattei (Corrispondenza Romana, September 5), criminal counts are said to be in the process of being researched and drafted for a
libellus accusatorius (canonical criminal complaint) against Viganò having allegedly committed perjury and for having breached pontifical and other forms of state secrecy in violation of, among other norms, the Instruction Secreta continere on the Pontifical Secret issued on February 4, 1974 by John Cardinal Villot, Secretary of State of the Vatican.
The specific Norms of Secreta being researched for applicability and evidence in support of potential prosecution include:
1. Art. I-4 for Abp. Viganò’s alleged divulgation of extrajudicial denunciations received by him during his service of the Holy See regarding crimes against faith and morals and the Sacrament of Penance, and the process and decision pertaining to the handling of these denunciations regarding Theodore Cardinal McCarrick and other clerics referenced by Viganò in his testimony and in the articles of journalists to whom the archbishop is alleged to have disseminated such classified information;
2. Art. I-7 for his alleged dissemination of Vatican secrets gained by reason of office pertaining to appointments of bishops, specifically regarding the appointment of Cdl. Blase Cupich as archbishop of Chicago, Illinois;
3. Art. I-9 for his alleged divulgation of the electronically encrypted order transmitted by the Secretariat of State to Abp. Viganò regarding the appointment of Bp. Robert McElroy to the see of San Diego, California;
4. Art. I-10 for his breaching of "business or matters which are so grave in nature that they are placed under the Pontifical Secret by the Supreme Pontiff or a Cardinal of the relevant Dicastery."
News of the Vatican deploying its vast international resources to track down and prosecute Abp. Viganò are consistent with his assertions made to Aldo Maria Valli on their final encounter last week: that Viganò had "purchased a plane ticket," that he was "traveling abroad," that he "could not tell [Valli] where," that Valli "should not try to find him," that "his old cellular number will no longer be functioning," and that they "saluted each other one last time."
Viganò, in saying goodbye to Valli, appears to have known exactly what the worst elements of the Vatican and its agents are capable of. Let us hope he has taken every necessary precaution from falling into the hands of those who would wish him ill.
Obviously, Smirak wrote the ff before learning of Bergoglio's own sacrilegious comparisons of his silence on the Vigano charges to Jesus's refusal to engage the mob of Nazarenes who chased him out of the synagogue and wished to hurl him off a cliff.
The innocence of serpents:
Bergoglio's silence is not Jesus's silence
by John Zmirak
September 8, 2018
What’s the worst part of Pope Francis’s response to the exposure of clerical sex abuse and cover-ups?
You might say, “Where to begin?” and point to a dozen different facets of the corruption of the priesthood by our bishops.
The list of scandals against supernatural faith and natural justice could fill up thousands of words. Others such as Paul Rahe and Benjamin Wiker have done yeoman’s work unpacking it all. I don’t need to add very much. Let me just mention one point which offends me to the core.
Not just as a Catholic. Or even as a Christian. If I were a mere agnostic, it still would turn my stomach.
And that’s the claim made by Pope Francis’s defenders that in refusing to answer Abp. Vigano’s charges, the pope is acting like Jesus, when He was hauled up before Herod:
And Herod, seeing Jesus, was very glad; for he was desirous of a long time to see Him, because he had heard many things of Him; and he hoped to see some sign wrought by Him. And he questioned Him in many words. But He answered him nothing. (Luke 23: 8-9)
Quite a potent tactic. It’s a way of painting stonewalling as an imitation of Christ. Father Marcial Maciel used this stratagem, and for a long while it worked. As one accuser came forth after another, he smothered their claims in silence. That gave his monied cronies and guilty enablers a high-minded pretext to hide behind, as many did, for years.
In fact, it’s the starkest blasphemy.
Even fair-minded unbelievers ought to be outraged, if they see Jesus for what He was: an innocent man, hunted to His death by political enemies.
To seize on Jesus’s innocence, and His dignified refusal to answer the corrupt tyrant Herod, who would have set Him free in return for some petty miracle … and weaponize it on behalf of a ruler’s arrogant silence…. That is repulsive, on a purely human level. It’s like smooshing together Anne Frank and Josef Goebbels as “casualties of the Second World War.”
Too much you say? Isn’t it equally possible that Pope Francis indeed is innocent, at least of the charge that he knew about and repealed Benedict’s (feeble) sanctions against McCarrick? And did so in return for McCarrick’s support at the Conclave?
We may never know.
The documents which prove Vigano’s testimony are under the pope’s control. Unless he’s already ordered that they be shredded, they sit in archives in Rome and in Washington, D.C. at the nunciature. Journalists should be demanding them.
- A U.S. attorney ought to subpoena these files, to see if U.S. bishops violated RICO laws by shuffling sex abusers.
- The Church ought to have to hand them over, waiving its frail diplomatic immunity as the price of ongoing relations with the United States of America.
I don’t know if that will happen. My colleague Austin Ruse has called on President Trump to demand it. All that is politics. Who knows how it will play out?
But we do know the following facts:
- The pope lives in a house (Casa Santa Marta) managed by a priest who consorted with male prostitutes
[and openly lived in with his Swiss lover while serving the Nunciature in Paraguay].
- Francis was backed for the papacy by molester Cardinal McCarrick and coverup artist-cardinals Danneels and Wuerl.
- He plucked Danneels from disgrace under Benedict XVI, inviting Danneels to join him when he first addressed Roman crowds, and asking him to speak (at the Synod on the Family) to the bishops of the world.
- Pope Francis has previously lifted penalties on at least one powerful molester in the mold of McCarrick.
- Francis defied cries of victims, and elevated a bishop in Chile who’d actively covered for a molester.
- When the pope’s mockery of the victims blew up in the press, he blamed the local bishops and called one victim to Rome.
- Then he told the young man that God (not the priest who molested him) had “made him gay.”
Think of all this. Think then of Father Maciel.
And think of the innocence of Jesus.
Bergoglio's increasingly sacrilegious and hubristic self-equations to Jesus indicate a condition of pathologic lunacy, don't you think? His followers should be worried. Unless they continue to stand by him whatever he says or does. Althoughy we've already seen quite a few dropouts from the wagon-circlers.
Viganogate: A 2006 letter confirms part of the Nuncio's story
And why has the pope not replied to the USCCB president's
request for an audience to discuss the US situation?
Translated from
September 8, 2018
Viganògate, although its coverage has almost disappeared from the mainstream Italian media which appear fearful of annoying the pope and the Vatican, continues to have fresh developments.
A letter from October 2006, scanned and provided to Catholic News Service [the news agency of the USCCB], confirms in part what Archbishop Vigano denounced in his 11-page testimony regarding the co ver-up – in Rome and in the USA – as well as the complicity that Theodore McCarrick enjoyed in the Church hierarchy about his record as a homosexual predator of seminarians and young priests, becoming in the Be4rgoglio era, the mastermind for US episcopal and cardinalatial appointments .
The letter was written by the then Deputy Secretary of State Leonardo Sandri, now cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches. Sandri refers to a letter written in November 2000 by Fr. Boniface Ramsey to the then Nuncio in the USA, Mons. Gabriel Montalvo, to alert him about sexual abuses committed by McCarrick.
Ramsey told CNS: “I decried McCarrick’s questionable relations with seminarians and the whole business of sleeping with seminarians, etc – all that we now know for sure”. Ramsey taught at the seminary of the Immaculate Conception in New Jersey from 1986-1996.
In the 2006 letter, Sandri asks Ramsey for information about an American priest who had been recommended for a post in the Vatican. “I ask with particular reference to the serious questions about some students at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception that you had been so kind as to bring confidentially to the attention of the then Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo.”
Strangely, Sandri does not mention McCarrick. And Ramsey thinks it is because the charges against the then cardinal “were too sensitive”. He points out: “My letter of November 22, 2000, was about McCarrick, and I made no accusations against any seminarians. I was accusing McCarrick”.
CNS reported: “[Sandri’s] letter of 2006 not only confirms statements made in the past by Fr. Ramsey, but also some elements in the document published by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was the Nuncio to the USA from 2011-2016”.
Therefore, at this point, even the detractors of Viganò are forced to admit that he has not invented his allegations. Indeed, the line followed by the pope’s defenders who have castled themselves within the extraordinary silence of the papal bunker had to change.
As even homosexualist Bergoglian James Martin commented:
“The letter was received in 2000 during the pontificate of John Paul II, who a few months later, made McCarrick a cardinal. He served as Archbishop of Washington until 2006, when Benedict XVI was Pope. Let us stop blaming Pope Francis unfairly for McCarrick’s rise to power”.
Some considerations for Martin:
- We have no testimony from anyone who, under John Paul II or Benedict XVI, had directly informed either of them about who McCarrick was and his misconduct. We do have Mons. Viganò’s account of informing Pope Francis about this, and that the pope chose not to reply to his disclosure. This is a crucial and central point in the Viganò testimony.
- Neither John Paul II nor Benedict XVI (who instead sanctioned McCarrick but apparently, with little effect) were friends of McCarrick.
- Nor did they have him lobby for them to become pope (as McCarrick himself boasted he did for Bergoglio).
- Nor did they send him around the world as their personal representative.
- Nor did they use him as an adviser on which Americans to appoint as bishops or name cardinals. All of which Bergoglio did.
Therefore, it is reasonable to say that Martin’s argument (and the rest of the Bergogliac gang, Jesuit or not) is at the very least deficient, if not simply false.
Let us recall, once more, the kernel of this story. Which is Mons. Viganò’s account of his audience with this pope in June 2013:
Immediately after, the Pope asked me in a deceitful way: “What is Cardinal McCarrick like?” I answered him with complete frankness and, if you want, with great naiveté: “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.”
The Pope did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time, and he immediately changed the subject. But then, what was the Pope’s purpose in asking me that question: “What is Cardinal McCarrick like?” He clearly wanted to find out if I was an ally of McCarrick or not.
Let us point out that the Church in the USA - like the Church in Honduras, Chile and Australia – is in the midst of an unprecedented judicial tempest, as many states have now decided to open investigations into priestly sex abuse as Pennsylvania did.
In the light of this, it seems even more disconcerting that the pope has yet to acknowledge a request for an audience made by the president of the USCCB, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, to discuss the situation in the US Church with regards to clerical sex abuse and episcopal cover-ups.
An extraordinary lack of response. Especially considering that meanwhile,
he, Bergoglio, has found time to meet with two friends and proteges of McCarrick – Cardinals Cupich and Wuerl, and to organize, according to some reports, a meeting with Cardinal Coccopalmerio and other canon law experts to study what sanctions may be applied against Mons. Viganò for his disclosures.
And if he did decide to sanction Viganò, it would be a scandalous error. Imagine seeking counsel to punish Viganò for his unwelcome testimony
from a cardinal who claims he had no knowledge of the homosexual and drug habits of his own secretary who hosted orgies in his Vatican apartment [said to have been assigned to him by the pope at the request of Coccopalmerio]! If this were a movie, we would accuse the director of exaggerating to discredit the Church!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/09/2018 01:14]