The New York Times graphic on 10/12/18 depicts the massive cover-up of the clerical/episcopal sex abuse crisis that begins from the man at the top, and offers new proof that even for his once-staunch champions in the media, the bloom
has faded off the Bergoglian pontificate.
The pope ignores the damage
as another prelate 'falls'
Others were more complicit in covering up priestly abuse,
but Cardinal Donald Wuerl still committed serious mistakes.
By The Editorial Board
October 12, 2018
Editors' Note:The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.
In his letter on Friday accepting the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the Catholic archbishop of Washington,
Pope Francis praised the departing prelate for his “nobility” in not trying to defend “mistakes” in his handling of sexual-abuse allegations.
The pope misses the point.
[HE SIMPLY DOES NOT 'GET IT' - AND IT SEEMS HE NEVER HAS ON THE CLERICAL SEX ABUSE ISSUE.]
The archbishop may not be as culpable as other bishops who more systematically covered up sexual predation, and in at least one case he took action that was initially thwarted by the Vatican.
But a devastatingly detailed grand jury report on widespread child sex abuse in Pennsylvania churches showed that Cardinal Wuerl, as bishop of Pittsburgh, was immersed in a clerical culture that hid pedophilic crimes behind euphemisms, conducted unprofessional investigations and evaluations of accused priests, kept acknowledged cases of sex abuse secret from parish communities and avoided reporting the abuse to police.
In an anguished letter to his archdiocese, Cardinal Wuerl accepted responsibility for actions described in the grand jury report. “I wish that I could redo some decisions I have made in my three decades as a bishop and each time get it right,” he wrote.
Pope Francis’s warm feelings for Cardinal Wuerl may be understandable, given that the archbishop has been a supporter of the social changes the pope is trying to achieve in the Catholic Church. Conservative prelates who have fought those changes have accused the pope of covering up accusations that the previous archbishop of Washington, the former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, sexually harassed and abused seminarians.
Cardinal Wuerl’s standing was weakened by his association with his predecessor, although he insists he knew nothing about the allegations. Pope Francis saw Cardinal Wuerl’s resignation as a sacrifice for the good of the church amid the attacks by critics like Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States who has vigorously pressed charges of a church cover-up.
Yet by indicating that he regards Cardinal Wuerl’s past actions simply as “mistakes,” and by allowing him to remain a member of the powerful Congregation for Bishops, the pope reinforces the sense that he does not understand the extraordinary damage done by clerics who cruelly and shamelessly abused their power over trusting children and adults. What the Pennsylvania grand jury report and other reports chronicle is not “inappropriate contact,” as diocesan records so often claimed, but the brutal and repeated rape of innocents who have been marked by this for life.
Pope Francis was
similarly slow to understand the gravity of sexual abuse cases in Chile, initially defending bishops and acting only after he listened to survivors.
[It was not a question of 'slowness' at all on the part of the pope but of his obstinate resistance to anything and anyone that dares oppose his dicta - until he realizes that persisting in his obstinacy is doing him more harm than good.]
To restore the trust of its faithful and its standing in the world, the Vatican needs to make a more vigorous and sincere effort to acknowledge the damage done by abusive priests and Vatican officials who perpetuated the abuse.
Cardinal Wuerl seemed to understand this when he said
he was making way for younger bishops consecrated since the crisis burst into the open in 2002, and for that he deserves credit. [He's not exactly making way for anyone just yet, because Bergoglio has kept him on as Apostolic Administrator of the Archdiocese, and he can well keep him on as such until
But if the church is to make amends for the scars it has inflicted on thousands of its members, the pope must do a far better job of demonstrating at every opportunity that there is no “nobility” whatsoever in the way sexual predation was allowed to spread through the church, that he will not tolerate the slightest of “mistakes” in the handling of such abuse and that he will upend a rotten Vatican culture that let it all happen.
Of the triad of media giants that worked together and independently in 2010 to force Benedict XVI to resign by seeking - IN VAIN - to find anything that linked him directly to a sex abuse case or its cover-up, Der Spiegel and the New York Times have now turned against
Bergoglio in a big way because of the sex abuse issue and what it says about what someone rightly called the culture of mendacity that has pervaded the Church for a long time and which led to all the cover-ups about sexual crimes and misconduct by priests and bishops in the past several decades.
AP, the third colossus in the anti-Benedict triad, so far continues to give Bergoglio the benefit of the doubt, although the very Bergoglian Nicole Winfield, AP's Vatican correspondent, did devote at least one story to reports of how Cardinal Bergoglio ignored, glossed over, or covered up incidents of clerical sex abuse as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and president of the Argentine bishops' conference. Der Spiegel investigated these reports in Argentina and made them part of its 19-page J'Accuse against Bergoglio. But few in the Anglophone world - other than LifeSite News and 1Peter5 on the blogosphere - seem to attach any importance to it at all.
Why are the rest all giving Bergoglio a pass on his dubious past? One would think that they presaged his papal record of making pets out of the likes of McCarrick, Mons. Ricca, Cardinal Coccopalmerio and his proteges like 'Don Mercedes' Inzoli and the cardinal's orgiast secretary, Mons Capozzi, not to forget Mons. Paglia of the homoerotic cathedral mural. And I am sure they are just the tip of the iceberg in the Curia's homo-hierarchy.
About Damian Thompson's reaction to the farcical resignation of Cardinal Wuerl, I would say Bergoglio threw in that eulogy of Wuerl to 'justify' why he was keeping him on anyway as apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese he is supposed to be vacating. Moreover, he remains president of the DC-based papal gravy train called the PAPAL FOUNDATION.
I was going to say that more importantly, he is also keeping him on at the Congregation for Bishops where theoretically, his support would be critical, if not essential, to any progressivist US bishops Bergoglio decides to name in the future. But I remembered that this particularly congregation has long become Bergoglio's personal fiefdom, where he has two 'agents' calling the shots for him, effectively castrating Cardinal Marc Ouellet of any but rubberstamp functions in the congregation he is supposed to head. (It was that Ouellet in his role as assiduous Bergoglian courtier who willingly allowed himself to be instrumentalized in an attempt to put down Mons. Carlo Vigano. That hardly worked out at all, did it?) So no, Bergoglio does not need Wuerl in Bishops for any pragmatic reason at all, other than as yet another display of how he has the congregation completely under his thumb.
Pope Francis was wrong
to shower praise on Cardinal Wuerl
by Damian Thompson
Oct. 12, 2018
Pope Francis accepted the resignation of the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who is under intense pressure to explain what he knew about his disgraced predecessor, the sex abuser and ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
Wuerl had asked to resign. He knew his position was untenable: not only is there widespread scepticism about his claim that he didn’t know McCarrick routinely assaulted seminarians, but he’s also under fire for alleged mishandling of abuse cases when he was Bishop of Pittsburgh.
His departure hasn’t come as a surprise: he is past retirement age anyway.
But many Catholics are disconcerted – to put it mildly – by the Pope’s letter to Wuerl, in which he praises the embattled cardinal in language more appropriate to a canonisation than resignation under a cloud.
Francis told Wuerl:
‘You have sufficient elements to “justify” your actions and distinguish between what it means to cover up crimes or not to deal with problems, and to commit some mistakes. However, your nobility has led you not to choose this way of defence. Of this, I am proud and thank you.’
It’s a confusing statement, but one thing is clear:
Donald Wuerl remains one of the Pope’s favourite cardinals. This talk of ‘nobility’ is a classic example of his determination to defend his allies, almost irrespective of what they have done or are accused of doing.
Cardinal Wuerl is no villain, unlike McCarrick. His rise in the Church has as much to do with his passion for evangelism as his networking skills. His record of handling sex abuse cases is genuinely mixed: if he made mistakes in Pittsburgh, it’s also true that in other cases he showed greater willingness to punish miscreants than some of his fellow bishops.
What brought him down – and what makes Pope Francis’s letter so bizarrely tone-deaf – is the monumental scandal of McCarrick.
To understand how, read the Vatican observer Fr Raymond de Souza, editor-in-chief of the influential Convivium magazine, writing in the National Catholic Register today. Wuerl had to go because his own priests in Washington ‘thought he was lying’ about what he knew about McCarrick, writes de Souza (who adds that this doesn’t prove that Wuerl actually was lying). As he puts it (my emphases in bold):
It was the McCarrick matter that brought him down. Precisely, his repeated insistence that he did not know about Cardinal McCarrick until the Archdiocese of New York announced in June that an allegation of sexual abuse of minor had been “substantiated.”
His priests did not believe him. They thought that he was lying in public and lying to them. When Archbishop Carlo Viganò wrote that Cardinal Wuerl “lies shamelessly” in his “testimony” published in late August, it confirmed conclusions that many Washington priests had already arrived at.
Further details from Archbishop Viganò’s testimony have subsequently been confirmed by the Vatican, most recently by Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, who acknowledged that the nuncios in Washington were informed about Archbishop McCarrick and the restrictions placed upon him [by Pope Benedict XVI].
It is simply not possible that the nuncio in Washington, communicating restrictions from the Holy See upon Archbishop McCarrick for sexual misconduct, would not have told Cardinal Wuerl about what was being done to his predecessor, still resident in the archdiocese.
According to Fr de Souza, the Pope had told Cardinal Wuerl that he would have to accept his resignation if he had lost the confidence of his clergy. Wuerl discovered that he had indeed lost this confidence and his fate was sealed.
Pope Francis could have accepted his resignation in language that, while recognising Wuerl’s many virtues, acknowledged that his credibility had been called into question.
Instead, he showered him in compliments and, as a sign of papal favour, has made Wuerl ‘apostolic administrator’ of Washington until a successor can be found. There are rumours that the job will go to Cardinal Joseph Tobin, another Francis loyalist who was close to McCarrick. Meanwhile, Christopher Altieri, writing in the Catholic Herald, reckons that Wuerl will remain the Pope’s unofficial man in DC. As Altieri puts it:
By accepting Wuerl’s resignation, but also keeping him on as Apostolic Administrator, the Pope shows he is working to a particular modus operandi.
There seem to be three basic steps: (1) ignore criticism and impugn critics’ motives; (2) when that becomes impracticable make a big show of doing something, without actually doing much of anything; (3) if necessary, remove a high-profile figure, but not really.
At the very least, Francis’s letter is an implied rebuke to Washington priests who criticised Wuerl and who are worried by what de Souza calls a ‘culture of clerical mendacity’. That culture is reflected not only in the chorus of ‘I never suspected a thing!’ coming from McCarrick’s bishop friends, but also a string of little episodes in the Vatican, whose communications department was caught photoshopping a letter from Benedict XVI to make it look as if he was endorsing a series of booklets celebrating the theology of Pope Francis.
‘How deep can the culture of clerical mendacity go?’ asks de Souza.
Good question – but you might also ask how high it goes. Donald Wuerl is not the only bishop accused of concealing what he knew about McCarrick. So is the Pope himself.
As Der Spiegel put it:
Incidentally, did Fr Spadaro, Fr Rosica, Andrea Tornielli or any other Bergoglio spinmeister even think of writing a letter to the editor of DER SPIEGEL to protest what the magazine
accuses Bergoglio of having done? Isn't it BEYOND REMARKABLE that not a peep came out of the usual suspects after the Spiegel expose? And this time, they can't
answer by orchestrating a smear campaign against Spiegel the way they did against Mons Vigano. Besides, how can any of them credibly deny that Bergoglio is a habitual
liar, who does not think there is anything wrong with taking the Word of the Lord in vain - in order to claim that Jesus approved, if not initiated, the anti-Catholic
measures and statements that Bergoglio has been disseminating relentlessly - and therefore he blasphemes Christ habitually?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/10/2018 03:39]