The pope and his accusers
Can Francis change the church while stonewalling on sex abuse?
Oct. 6, 2018
Let me ask you to do the impossible, tear your mind away from the Kavanaugh affair for a moment, and cast your eyes from the new Rome to the old one — from the American Empire’s judicial wars to the similar mix of scandal, polarization, and intrigue in the Roman Catholic Church.
The pontificate of Francis and the presidency of Donald Trump have been odd mirrors of one another for a while — populist leaders, institutional crises, norm violations, #metoo scandals, leaks and whistle-blowers and cries of “fake news” and more. And as the Trump era has moved toward its Kavanaugh crescendo, the Catholic drama has also escalated, with the church’s doctrinal conflict and its sex abuse scandal converging in a single destabilizing crisis.
This month the crux of the drama is the Synod on Young People, a meeting of bishops in Rome that
like prior synods in the Francis era is a chance for the pope to prod some alteration of church teaching on sexuality through a process stage-managed to give the appearance of consensus.
No such consensus was evident in the prior two synods, in which the contested issue was divorce and remarriage, but the pope forged ahead with an ambiguous revision of church teaching, currently half-digested around the Catholic world. This time, thanks to his appointments there are fewer bishops in opposition, and the synod’s endgame is probably some ambiguously liberalizing statement on homosexuality, contraception or both.
The promise of such change would normally guarantee the pontiff a wave of favorable media coverage. But
glowing profiles of Francis are no longer easy to write, because the pope is now besieged by sexual scandal and his initial response was in a style familiar from Trump-era American politics — a mix of stonewalling, scapegoating and literal demonization.
The most notable of his accusers, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, charged the pope and many prominent cardinals with having knowledge of the crimes of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and allowing him to maintain honor and influence nonetheless. Viganò’s allegations were flavored with conservative theological grievances, but t
heir broad outline has held up under scrutiny, and the Vatican has finally been forced to promise, as of this weekend, a "thorough study of the entire documentation present in the Archives of the Dicasteries and Offices of the Holy See regarding the former Cardinal McCarrick."
Whether this is a real investigation or a P.R. move remains to be seen, but it's a welcome change from the initial response, which consisted of sermons from Francis in which
the pope likened himself to a silent, blameless Christ and claimed that the Great Accuser, the Devil, was at work in allegations against bishops.
If so, Lucifer seems to have a lot to work with, including a newfound scrutiny of the pope’s tenure in Argentina, where victims are accusing him of chilly indifference to clerical sex abuse. The story is getting particular attention in Germany, home of many of Francis’s allies in the hierarchy; the newsmagazine
Der Spiegel has a cover package that casts a cold eye on the pope, with
harsh quotes from Argentines suggesting that “he protected for years rapists and abusers.” [To which, remarkably, there has not been a peep of any reaction whatsoever from the Vatican, nor the usual arrogant loudmouth Bergoglio surrogates. COMPLETE SILENCE on the Spiegel dossier.Their denial of reality seems to hinge on the principle, "If you ignore it, it does not exist'.]
To Francis’s allies much of the scandal is dismissed as a plot by his enemies, an attempted coup by frustrated conservatives.
[This is absurd. There is no evidence cited by anyone at all that Vigano did what he did in collusion with or at the urging of other 'conservatives', though he did have the good sense to have two respected Italian Vaticanistas of long-standing (both admittedly outspoken critics of Bergoglio's anti-Catholicism) vet his Testimony to make sure it passed journalistic muster.]
But if so it’s the most ineffectual coup imaginable, with no actual plan for changing the direction of his pontificate. Michael Brendan Dougherty of
National Review likened Viganò’s bombshell to the failed putsch by Turkish officers against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which led nowhere because none of the higher-ups could execute a plan.
[But Viganò espoused no plan at all, except to call on the pope to resign - which is wishful thinking that not a few Catholics share, but it remains just that. Because realistically, the only way to get rid of Bergoglio is if he resigns, which he won't, or if he dies, which is in God's hands. That is why all the 'action' so far on the part of Catholics increasingly concerned about how this pope is deliberately trampling on the Deposit of Faith has consisted in online appeals that assume his 'good faith' in both the literal and symbolic sense - neither of which he obviously possesses. Five years and going on seven months now, it is clear that only a handful of cardinals and slightly more bishops are even brave enough to speak out against some of Bergoglio's most egregiously objectionable actions and statements. So the laity can obviously expect nothing from them. So, for Dougherty and people like him who ought to know better, it is really absurd to even think that Vigano's letter was intended to launch a putsch of any kind! It was a very public alarm, that's all - like tolling church bells to warn people of a major imminent danger - and it has worked and is working as such.]
So it is among the church’s conservative cardinals: To talk with anti-Francis churchmen is to encounter not Machiavellian plots but despair and bafflement and impotence.
Which the pope senses, seemingly, because
his response to the scandals has been to refuse obvious adaptations —
there have been no further resignations in his corruption-tainted inner circle, no Roman investigation of the American church despite the specific request for one from the American bishops —
while plunging ahead boldly on other fronts.
So far the current sex abuse agony has been punctuated by - a papal revision of church teaching on the death penalty
- a dramatic, high-risk deal with the Communist government in Beijing.
This month’s synod may provide further doctrinal punctuation.
No scandal is big enough, apparently, to derail the pope’s ambitions to leave the church permanently changed.
But this approach guarantees that the scandals will keep coming. As the bishops met in Rome, there was a story stateside about a group of American donors funding investigations into sexual and financial improprieties among the College of Cardinals, trying to expose the other red-hatted McCarricks before the next papal conclave rolls around.
This effort was quickly attacked as a right-wing witch-hunt, animated by an un-Catholic sense of the church as a contested political space. Which is a fair critique — except that the pope himself is the one driving the church to that point, by treating traditional piety as a roadblock to his efforts, by demonizing whistle-blowers in an age of awful scandal, and generally behaving less like a pastor than an ideologue in white.
The truth is that Francis can pre-empt the right-wing partisans with a Roman housecleaning, an American investigation, an accounting for both his own record and his predecessors’ failures. Perhaps all this will happen. The alternative, silence and stonewalling, promises a church permanently in flames. [Which is what Bergoglio wants and has been espousing openly - Hagan lio! even if it means internal arson and he has been the hand that both ignites the flames and gleefully feeds them.!]
Two new statements from the Vatican
'addressing' the Vigano testimony
Neither seems to take into account the gravity
and magnitude of the Church's trust deficit
by Robert Royal
October 8, 2018
Two statements came out from the Vatican over the weekend, basically during the pause in the Synod for the Sunday observances. Both dealt with the McCarrick case, and were partly a reaction to the constant presence of that case and – indirectly – other abuse cases in synodal conversations about the Church and young people.
That’s become a necessity because, as Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher put it last week, many people were harmed and lost trust when they were young; and “The Church has to be the safest possible place for a person.”
The two new documents, however, still
leave room for doubt [What an understatement!] whether Rome understands what it would take for many people to trust that the Church will take the steps needed to make that really happen. (In addition, Cardinal DiNardo and Archbishop Gomez, president and vice-president of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference meet with the pope today. The new documents also seem timed to put that meeting into a certain context.)
The first text came Saturday as a brief, official Communication from the Holy See, saying that Pope Francis was aware of the confusion among the faithful since the revelations about McCarrick and wanted them to know about several phases in the investigation. As mounting evidence arrived from the Archdiocese of New York, the Holy Father accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals, “prohibiting him by order from exercising public ministry, and obliging him to lead a life of prayer and penance.” This most Catholics already knew.
It continued: “the Holy Father has decided that information gathered during the preliminary investigation be combined with a further thorough study of the entire documentation present in the Archives of the Dicasteries and Offices of the Holy See regarding the former Cardinal McCarrick, in order to ascertain all the relevant facts, to place them in their historical context and to evaluate them objectively.” The pope admitted that this investigation may discover that decisions were made in the past in ways that we would not choose today, but that “We will follow the path of truth wherever it may lead.”
This is all basically as it should be – except for one thing.
Has the pope only now decided that the “entire documentation” in the files needs to be studied along with recent accusations? [Obviously yes. Under tremendous pressure from the fact that this issue was hardly to be resolved by simply accepting McCarrick's resignation of his cardinalate, and that it - and the general crisis over this pope's handling of the clerical/episcopal sex abuse mess - aren't going away for now, no matter what distractions the Vatican contrives to strew in the way.]
We know that the Vatican is maddeningly slow in such matters. But McCarrick resigned in late July. We are now well into October.
Does it take that long for a modern pope to decide – or announce the decision – that the files will actually be examined? And we are still five months away from the February meeting of presidents of national bishops conferences, which Pope Francis has called to address the abuse crisis globally. There seems to be, to put it mildly, no sense of urgency in the Vatican about this case and others.
[ABSOLUTELY NONE AT ALL. Don't forget the pope's 4-page 'Letter to the People of God' which was his belated response to the release of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, about which the Vatican said it was an exhaustive response to the sex-abuse issue and not to expect any further response from the pope! Not too many observers took issue with the cavalier dismissal by the Bergoglio Vatican of the scandals uncovered because 'they all took place before 2002, since when things have improved significantly'. No, they did not. Unless you consider McCarrick's 'rehabilitation' under Bergoglio and his status as his confidante on US matters and as emissary to diplomatic flashpoints like Cuba and China, a 'significant improvement' - and his case was just the most egregious of all the Bergoglian lapses in observing his much-hyped 'zero tolerance' for clerical/episcopal offenses having to do with sex crimes.
This is not mere nitpicking. We live in the age of instant communication. For a long time, it’s looked as if Rome was not going to do very much more than it usually has – which, to the eye, seems woefully inadequate – even after the August bombshell Testimony of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. That Testimony claimed that the pope has known about McCarrick since early after his election in 2013. Therefore, “In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church. . . .Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up [Cardinal Theodore] McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with the rest of them.”
Which brings us to the second document, released yesterday, by Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. Ouellet published a letter addressed to Viganò; it looks as if the pope himself will not reply.
Calling Viganò’s charges “incomprehensible and extremely reprehensible,” Ouellet bluntly said, “I tell you frankly that to accuse Pope Francis of having covered-up knowingly the case of an alleged sexual predator and, therefore, of being an accomplice of the corruption that is spreading in the Church, to the point of considering him unworthy of continuing his reform as the first pastor of the Church, is incredible and unlikely from all points of view.”
Ouellet has himself been accused by Viganò of knowing and not really saying anything about McCarrick. So his claims cannot be entirely unbiased. And
he seems to weaken his own defense by admitting that he knew of Pope Benedict’s restrictions on McCarrick, but that these were not formal “sanctions” that Pope Francis then lifted, as Viganò has characterized them.
That has been a serious bone of contention from the very beginning and some – the present writer included – have wondered about the status of those restrictions and any relaxing of them that may have occurred.
Pope Emeritus Benedict himself has publicly said that he does not remember their exact nature. [No, he has not, much less publicly! How can Mr Royal perpetrate an error originally reported in Edward Pentin's reportage on the first Vigano testimony, improbably attributing the statement to one Tim Busch, a conservative fatcat from California? Who has subsequently denied he said it. Which stands to reason because 1) How could he have obtained any statement from Benedict XVI, to begin with, and 2) simultaneous with the Vigano Testimony??? Who in the world can have direct access to Benedict XVI's cellphone? And obviously, Busch has no direct access to Mons. Gaenswein either, or we would have heard it. I think Mr Pentin should lay that canard to rest properly.]
Nevertheless, all this does confirm that
Viganò is entirely correct about at least one large point: many people, including the pope, knew that McCarrick’s misbehavior was grave enough that he was strongly told to stay in retirement in Washington and not to appear in public. He disregarded those restrictions, of course; even more blatantly – as many observers remarked – after Jorge Bergoglio’s election.
Ouellet says there are no documents in the files of the Congregation for Bishops formally sanctioning McCarrick because they did not then have as much evidence as they have now. But this in itself speaks of a serious breakdown: did no one care enough about past and potential future victims that they didn’t take the initiative to look further? [As I said in my fisking of Ouellet's letter, his congregation could have started with the three New Jersey settlements with victims as the most concrete and immediately available evidence of wrongdoing by McCarrick. But obviously, the congregation didn't even bother looking into the allegations they did have knowledge of. Why not? Because McCarrick was not only a cardinal but also one of Bergoglio's privileged pets?]
Even Ouellet, in the heat of his rebuke of Viganò, says he is surprised how McCarrick was able to become cardinal-archbishop of an important city like Washington given what was already in his file. And, he says, that’s worthy of investigation.
But here, too, the loss of trust in the system raises some doubts.
We know that McCarrick was not high on the list of candidates to become archbishop of Washington. Is there nothing in the McCarrick file at the Congregation for Bishops about how he leapt over a dozen better candidates? Viganò suggests that two homosexual advisers have been bypassing the usual process for bishops’ appointments in recent years.
Certainly, if decades ago, McCarrick had similarly powerful patrons in the Vatican, there must be some record of when and where they intervened. And how doubts were circumvented. You can’t help but feel that Ouellet has given
an incomplete account of the files and what they suggest.
[The 'incomplete' is deliberate, because it is part of the Bergoglian strategy of obfuscation to get out of a jam Omit mentioning anything that might have negative implications - because we will simply shred any such document out of existence, and who is to know it unless beforehand you hint at its existence in any way!]And that only a more open and independent review of the whole matter will resolve various questions and – let’s hope – restore trust.
The Holy See is suffering under a severe trust deficit at the moment, partly deserved, partly not.
[Partly deserved or not, the trust deficit is there and growing by the minute as fast as the US national debt.] But it exists and must be dealt with, lest it become even worse.
We’ve just seen sharp criticism of the Vatican-China agreement by many observers – so sharp that Cardinal Zen has called on Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State (and the person responsible for the details of the agreement), to resign for his betrayal of the underground Church in China.
So in a short period, an archbishop (Viganò) has called on a pope (Francis) to resign, and a cardinal (Zen) has called on another cardinal (Parolin) to resign. There’s been nothing like this in modern times. Is it any wonder young people are often confused and uncertain whether the Church is worthy of their trust?
Cardinal Ouellet’s letter to Viganó
makes two important admissions –
and a puzzling claim
by Joseph Shaw
October 8, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Those observing the developing controversy which has followed Archbishop Viganó’s extraordinary denunciation of Pope Francis had their patience rewarded by an official response from a leading Cardinal, the Canadian Marc Ouellet.
As Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops since 2010, he is uniquely qualified to confirm or deny what is perhaps the central factual claim of Viganó’s testimony. This is that in 2009 or 2010 (I quote from Viganó’s testimony):
Pope Benedict had imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis: the Cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance.
(McCarrick had retired at the usual age from the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. in 2007. On June 20, 2018, he was stripped of the title of Cardinal in light of allegations that he had sexually abused a minor. He retains the rank of Archbishop.)
This claim is explosive because
following the election of Pope Francis, McCarrick was, as one journalist approvingly expressed, “back in the mix and busier than ever,” having been “more or less put out to pasture” by Pope Benedict.
Archbishop Viganó made a special point in his testimony of pointing to Cardinal Ouellet, among others, as able to corroborate his claims. In a second public letter, he addressed Cardinal Ouellet directly:
Your Eminence, before I left for Washington, you were the one who told me of Pope Benedict’s sanctions on McCarrick. You have at your complete disposal key documents incriminating McCarrick and many in the curia for their cover-ups. Your Eminence, I urge you to bear witness to the truth.
So what has Cardinal Ouellet said in response? The key passage on this question of substance, in a long letter, is as follows:
The former Cardinal, retired in May of 2006, had been requested not to travel or to make public appearances, in order to avoid new rumors about him. It is false, therefore, to present those measures as “sanctions” formally imposed by Pope Benedict XVI and then invalidated by Pope Francis.
After a review of the archives, I find that there are no documents signed by either Pope in this regard, and there are no audience notes from my predecessor, Cardinal Giovanni-Battista Re, imposing on the retired Archbishop the obligation to lead a quiet and private life with the weight normally reserved to canonical penalties.
The reason is that back then, unlike today, there was not sufficient proof of his alleged culpability. Thus, the Congregation’s decision was inspired by prudence, and the letters from my predecessor and my own letters urged him, first through the Apostolic Nuncio Pietro Sambi and then through you, to lead a life of prayer and penance, for his own good and for the good of the Church.
In the first sentence Cardinal Ouellet makes two admissions:
- first, that the Holy See was well aware of “rumors” about McCarrick, before Viganó’s appointment as Nuncio in 2011;
- secondly, that McCarrick was indeed under orders not to travel or make public appearances.
The rest of the quoted passage, and indeed the rest of Cardinal Ouellet’s letter, reads like
an attempt to play down the significance of these admissions.
- Ouellet denies the existence of any paper trail linking the sanctions on McCarrick to Pope Benedict personally, and
- he points out that the sanctions, if we may call them that, did not arise from a canonical trial. However, since it was clear from Viganó’s original letter that the sanctions were not publicly known, neither point is surprising.
As the canon lawyer and Catholic News Agency editor Edward Condon remarked on this passage: “Sounds like a precept to me.” The point is that
McCarrick was clearly placed under an obligation to observe these conditions, which were imposed by his canonical superiors, and delivered to him in person by the Pope’s official representative in America, and, on one Nuncio’s retirement, emphatically reiterated by his successor.
The significance of Viganó’s claim was never in the precise canonical category of McCarrick’s “life of prayer and penance,” but in the fact that there was something which Pope Francis later de facto lifted or rendered irrelevant.
Did Pope Francis know about the accusations against McCarrick?
- We might similarly ask whether Pope Francis was ignorant of the accusations of cover-up made against the Belgian Cardinal Godfried Daneels when he personally invited Daneels to participate in the Synod on the Family.
- In both cases, if by some chance Pope Francis did not know, it is hard to accept that no member of his staff, seeing such an innocent mistake, would not have felt obliged to inform him.
- On the other hand,
Pope Francis was clearly aware of the accusations against the abuser Fr. Mauro Inzoli, when he lifted sanctions against him, and of the accusations of cover-up against Bishop Juan Barros when he appointed him to a Chilean diocese against the wishes of his fellow bishops.
The fact is that Pope Francis clearly felt a certain freedom in brushing aside such accusations, which in the Barros case he memorably attributed to “leftists.” He has since apologized for his handling of that case, and may perhaps feel a similar contrition for his handling of others like it.
Another aspect of the defense of Pope Francis over McCarrick undermined by Cardinal Ouellet’s letter is the question of the Pope’s “silence.” When confronted by the news of Viganó’s testimony, Pope Francis said that he would “not say one word” about the matter. In a series of sermons, he later seems to make this silence into a virtue, even comparing it with the silence of Christ before His accusers.
From a public relations perspective silence is an appropriate response to accusations so absurd that their credibility would be enhanced, rather than reduced, by taking them seriously. However, the decision has clearly now been made that the policy of silence
[feigning for more than a month to ignore the substance of Vigano's claims] is not working.
Viganó’s accusations cannot be ignored; instead, a senior cardinal has stepped forward to address them: the very cardinal, in fact, whom Viganó most wanted to hear from.
This is an acknowledgement, however reluctant, that the accusations are worthy of response.
Finally, Cardinal Ouellet criticizes not only Viganó’s detailed claims, but his action of making them. Addressing Viganó directly, he exclaims:
"I wish that I could help you return to communion with him who is the visible guarantor of communion in the Catholic Church."
This is a very puzzling statement. The Pope is indeed “the visible guarantor of communion in the Catholic Church,” but
it does not break communion with a pope to criticize him, even harshly, or even unjustly.
- It is a profoundly worrying sign that a senior Cardinal should confuse the bond of communion with the Pope, which derives from baptism, with support for a particular Pope based on his personal qualities.
As far as is publicly known, or implied by Cardinal Ouellet’s letter, Archbishop Viganó has not disobeyed any command of his superiors; nor is he under any canonical penalty or (to use Cardinal Ouellet’s distinction) informal restriction.
Contrary to Cardinal Ouellet, those most loyal to the Pope at this moment of crisis are those who, if necessary in defiance of considerations of career and reputation, speak and hold fast to the truth, to make possible the cleansing of the Church from the “filth” which Pope Benedict warned besmirches it.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/10/2018 06:32]