In this Sept. 23, 2015 file photo, Pope Francis reaches out to hug Cardinal McCarrick after a meeting with more than 300 U.S. Bishops at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington. McCarrick prided
himself in having been among those who actively worked for the election of Jorge Bergoglio as pope.
Will more revelations of Cardinal McCarrick's
sex abuses lead the pope to take away his 'red hat'?
by Nicole Winfield
VATICAN CITY, Jan. 20, 2018 (AP) — Revelations that one of the most respected U.S. cardinals repeatedly sexually abused both boys and adult seminarians have raised questions about who in the Catholic Church hierarchy knew — and what Pope Francis is going to do about it.
If the accusations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick bear out — including a new case reported Friday involving an 11-year-old boy — will Francis revoke his title of cardinal? Sanction him to a lifetime of penance and prayer? Or even defrock him, the expected sanction if McCarrick were a mere priest?
And will Francis, who has already denounced a “culture of cover-up” in the church, take the investigation all the way to the top, where it will inevitably lead, given that McCarrick’s sexual misdeeds with adults were reportedly brought to the Vatican’s attention years ago?
The matter is on the desk of the pope, who has already spent the better part of 2018 dealing with a spiraling child sex abuse, adult gay sex and cover-up scandal in Chile that was so vast the entire bishops’ conference offered to resign in May.
And just Friday, Francis accepted the resignation of the Honduran deputy to Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, who is one of Francis’s top advisers.
Auxiliary Bishop Juan José Pineda Fasquelle, 57, was accused of sexual misconduct with seminarians and lavish spending on his lovers that was so obvious to Honduras’s poverty-wracked faithful that Maradiaga is now under pressure to reveal what he knew of Pineda’s misdeeds and why he tolerated a sexually active gay bishop in his ranks.
The McCarrick scandal, too, poses the same questions, given it was apparently an open secret in some U.S. church circles that “Uncle Ted” invited seminarians to his beach house, and into his bed.
While such an abuse of power may have been quietly tolerated for decades, it doesn’t fly in the #MeToo era, even though
there has been a deafening silence from McCarrick’s brother cardinals about what they might have known and when.
“There is going to be so much clamor for the Holy Father to remove the red hat, to formally un-cardinalize him,” said the Rev. Thomas Berg, vice rector and director of admissions at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, the seminary of the archdiocese of New York.
Recounting how the McCarrick scandal has demoralized seminarians and priests alike,
Berg said the church needs to ensure that men with same-sex attraction simply don’t enter seminaries — a position recently reinforced by Francis in reference to both the Chilean and Italian churches.
And Berg said
the church needs to take action when celibacy vows are violated. “We can’t effectively prevent the sexual abuse of minors or vulnerable adults by clergy while habitual and widespread failures in celibacy are quietly tolerated,” he said.
McCarrick, the 88-year-old retired archbishop of Washington and confidante to two popes, was ultimately undone when the U.S. church announced June 20 that Francis had ordered him removed from public ministry. The sanction was issued pending a full investigation into a “credible” allegation that he fondled a teenager more than 40 years ago in New York City.
The dioceses of Newark and Metuchen, New Jersey, simultaneously revealed that they had received three complaints of misconduct by McCarrick against adults and had settled two of them.
The
New York Times on Friday reported details of another alleged victim, the son of a McCarrick family friend identified as James, who reported that he was 11 when McCarrick first exposed himself to him. From there, McCarrick began a sexually abusive relationship that continued for another two decades, the Times quoted James as saying.
McCarrick has denied the initial allegation of abuse against a minor and accepted the pope’s decision to remove him from public ministry.
Asked Friday about the latest revelations in the Times, a spokeswoman said McCarrick hadn’t received formal notice of any new allegation but would follow the civil and church processes in place to investigate them.
Francis could take immediate action to remove McCarrick from the College of Cardinals, said Kurt Martens, a canon lawyer at the Catholic University of America.
He recalled the case of the late Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who recused himself from the 2013 conclave that elected Francis pope after unidentified priests alleged he engaged in sexual misconduct. In 2015, after a Vatican investigation, Francis accepted O’Brien’s resignation after he relinquished the rights and privileges of being a cardinal. O’Brien was, however, allowed to retain the cardinal’s title and he died a member of the college.
“I think that is totally unsatisfactory,” Martens said, noting that just as the pope can grant the title of cardinal, he can also take it away. “O’Brien resigned, the pope accepted it. Isn’t that the world upside down that someone picks his own penalty?”
O’Brien was never accused of sexually abusing a minor, however, as McCarrick now stands.
The stiffest punishment that an ordinary priest would face if such an accusation is proven would be dismissal from the clerical state, or laicization.
The Vatican rarely if ever, however, imposes such a penalty on elderly prelates. It also is loath to do so for bishops, because theologically speaking, defrocked bishops can still validly ordain priests and bishops.
Not even the serial rapist Rev. Marcial Maciel was defrocked after the Vatican finally convicted him of abusing Legion of Christ seminarians. Maciel was sentenced to a lifetime of penance and prayer — the likely canonical sanction for McCarrick if he is found guilty of abusing a minor in a church trial.
A blogger whose site is called 'Conquered by Love' reports and comments on the reaction of LGBTQ advocate and patron James Martin, SJ, to the McCarrick revelations - which were not revelations to him.
Fr. James Martin outs himself
as an enabler of sexual predators
July 20, 2018
Lousy catechesis in the Catholic Church has resulted in enablers that come in all shapes and sizes.
A lot of times, priests and bishops suffer from cowardice and spiritual sloth.
A good amount of cognitive dissonance comes from priests who are sexually active or wish they were.
Every once in a while, you bump into a priest/bishop/Cardinal whose lies are seductive, sophisticated and pathological.
They even lie when there's no reason to lie. Then they lie about their lies.
Everything Fr. James Martin says or writes is saturated with this kind of dishonesty.
Martin has written an exhaustive thesis on how and why 'Uncle Teddy' got away with his sexual crimes. It's every excuse in the book, except the real reason: There are hundreds of Uncle Teds in episcopal office, and Rome is filled to the rafters with them - so if you want to be a priest, you've got to keep under their radar.
Before Pope Francis, they were at least an underdog, though they still held powerful positions in Rome and had the capacity to destroy a vocation. Some priests claim they are capable of murder and this is one of the reasons why the Church has been unable to drive them out. They certainly have been given more power under Pope Francis, which is not at all edifying.
Fr. Martin admits he heard all the stories of Cardinal McCarrick's sexual assaults. He even knew where Cardinal McCarrick was committing sexual assaults. But, he never personally knew a victim, so the sexual assaults were OK to sweep under the rug because he admired him for his kindness and social justice work.
For the record, Cardinal McCarrick was also someone whom I, like many American Catholics, admired for both his pastoral work and social justice advocacy. Whenever I met him, he was also unfailingly kind, and I saw him extend that same kindness to others.
The overwhelming vibes Cardinal McCarrick gave off that he was a sexually-active homosexual might have had something to do with the admiration, too. After all, that is Fr. James Martin's entire shtick.
This is enabling at its best.
I cannot help but wonder how many other sexual predators in the Church he hasn't reported?
Mundabor calls attention to a 'delicious' irony involving two of Bergoglio's favorite cardinals in this item I belately saw...
Cardinal McCarrick well deserves
the 'Spirit Of Francis Award'
July 11, 2018
This is, in fact, no irony at all.
Cardinal McCarrick, a decades-long homosexual predator, truly deserves the “Spirit of Francis award” given to him by no other than Cardinal Cupich.
McCarrick did what many of these these homo scoundrels do: they go among the poor, spreading money and favours and, in the meantime, looking for uneducated, very poor victims too hungry or too afraid to speak. This is the method of the
curas villeros, the priest plunging (I should say: disappearing) into the Argentinian slums in search of easy prey, who so well epitomise this dirty papacy smelling of… shit.
If you have not understood by now that Cupich had to know about the allegations against McCarrick and the payments made to shush his accusers, and that he is clearly part and parcel, and immersed up to his neck, in this system of either homosexual conduct or, at least, homosexual blackmail, you have not been playing attention. How could, otherwise, a newly-minted Cardinal have been do dumb to link his name to a man the Cardinal had to know was unofficially radioactive?
[Mundabor links to the July 10, 2011 LifeSite report on the award given to the now disgraced cardinal on Nov. 27, 2016 in New York.
www.lifesitenews.com//news/spirit-of-pope-francis-award-given-to-cardinal-mccarrick-by-cardina...
But a news report on the award ceremony itself, held in Manhattan, can be found on
http://www.cathstan.org/Content/News/News/Article/Reach-out-to-the-poor-says-Cardinal-McCarrick-after-receiving-Spirit-of-Francis-Award/2/2/7477
The award was from Catholic Extension, a Chicago-based organization that helps with church construction, provides funds for ministerial needs and seminary training, and contributes other ways in underfunded dioceses around the USA. Cupich, who is the Chancellor of Catholic Extension, praises McCarrick for "his own unique way of making his mark on the Church. He’s always cared for people who are easily forgotten, who are on the margins. Even today, he is involved in efforts to open the doors to the church in China.” But the last line of the report is a real corker: "At the end of the presentation, New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan made a surprise appearance to express his 'appreciation and admiration and love for Cardinal McCarrick, whom all of us look up to'.” Did Dolan flash back to those words when he made the announcement last month that the Vatican had decided to strip McCarrick of his priestly faculties because of sex abuses committed on a minor in New York more than 40 years ago?]
I suspect of homosexuality every priest, Bishop or Cardinal who puts social work at the center of his “pastoral” activity, and so should you. They do this, certainly, in order to create a diversion from their loss of faith and from their betrayal of the Church, earning the easy applause of the world and ready-made career opportunities; but more often than not, they do this in order to find prey among the “dispossessed”.
McCorrick actually was even happy (and dumb enough, in retrospect) to assault his own seminarians instead of going huntin' in the “peripheries”; but this only shows what a scoundrel he is, not that the method does not work, or that he has himself not used it.
Congratulations, Cardinal McCorrick. You truly are an extremely worthy recipient of the “Spirit of Francis” award.
Congratulations, Cardinal Cupich. You are one of the standard bearers of the Church in which the likes of McCorrick have thrived for decades, honouring and enabling them and those like them.
We should talk about this “Spirit of Francis award” more. It is clear that, at the moment, it is all the rage.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/07/2018 09:44]