It is hard to know
what to think of the bombshell dropped by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò,
who released a scalding letter on Sunday (Aug. 26) calling on Pope Francis to
resign. Viganò, the former Vatican ambassador to the United States, claims in
the letter that Pope Francis knew that recently resigned Cardinal Theodore
McCarrick abused seminarians when he was a bishop in New Jersey but nonetheless
didn't punish the cardinal.
The 7,000-word
document also accuses about a dozen Vatican cardinals who served in the
papacies of John Paul, Benedict and Francis of being part of the coverup.
It might be easy to
write Viganò off as a disgruntled employee. He was denied the job he sought
under Pope Benedict XVI — president of the governorate of the Vatican City
State — and was sent to the United States as papal nuncio, or representative to
the U.S. government and the American church. In a 2012 memo to Pope
Benedict, which was leaked to the media, Viganò complained that he was being
exiled because he had made enemies trying to reform Vatican finances.
Nuncio to the
United States is no minor job, but the head of the Vatican government normally
becomes a cardinal.
Viganò became even
more unhappy with his job as nuncio after the election of Pope Francis, who
ignored his recommendations in the appointment of bishops. And although most
nuncios to the U.S. later become cardinals, it became clear that he was never
going to get a red hat.
It is worth noting
that many of the people Viganò accuses are the same people with whom he had
conflicts in the Vatican.
Nor is this the
first time Viganò has criticized the pope. He joined Cardinal Raymond Burke and
others in criticizing the pope's document on the family, "Amoris
Laetitia," because they thought it diverged from orthodoxy.
Disgruntled
employee? Yes. But many whistleblowers are disgruntled employees.
What is more
damning are questions about Viganò's own record regarding the American sex
abuse scandal. During legal proceedings against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and
Minneapolis, a 2014 letter from Viganò was uncovered in which he told
an auxiliary bishop to limit an investigation against the local archbishop and
to destroy evidence.
Viganò was
certainly not known for transparency and accountability while he was nuncio
from 2011 to 2016, but now he presents himself as a born-again defender of the
abused.
In the letter,
Viganò goes after many former and current officials in the Vatican, including
the three most recent secretaries of state: cardinals Angelo Sodano, Tarcisio
Bertone and Pietro Parolin. Other Vatican cardinals he alleges knew about
McCarrick's abuse include William Levada, Giovanni Battista Re, Marc Ouellet,
Leonardo Sandri, Fernando Filoni, Angelo Becciu, Giovanni Lajolo and Dominique
Mamberti.
Given how the
crimes of Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the
Legionairies of Christ, were ignored during the papacy of Pope John Paul II,
some of what Viganò says sounds possible. But no evidence is presented.
Interestingly, John
Paul escapes Viganò's criticism. Viganò implies that McCarrick’s appointment to
Washington and as a cardinal was the work of Sodano "when John Paul II was
already very ill." Yet McCarrick was appointed archbishop of Washington in
2000, five years before John Paul died. Was John Paul a puppet during his last
five years in office? And if McCarrick’s abuse of seminarians was so widely
known in John Paul’s curia, it is hard to believe that Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger did not know. Did he tell John Paul?
Viganò claims that
Re told him that, sometime between 2009 and 2010, Pope Benedict told McCarrick
to stop living at a seminary, saying Mass in public, traveling and lecturing.
But there is no
evidence to support the claim that McCarrick was sanctioned by Pope Benedict.
McCarrick continued to celebrate Mass, travel and lecture throughout the papacy
of Benedict. And on his many visits to Rome, he stayed at the North American
College, the residence for U.S. seminarians. Anyone who thinks Benedict would
tolerate such disobedience doesn’t know Benedict.
Viganò claims that
he told Pope Francis on June 23, 2013: "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." Since Pope Francis allegedly did not listen to him then, Viganò
thinks he should resign.
Viganò released his
letter as Pope Francis was wrapping up his visit to Ireland. Journalists asked
the pope about it during the press conference on the plane headed back to Rome.
"I will not
say one word on this," the pope said, according to a New York Times video.
"I think this statement speaks for itself, and you have sufficient
journalistic capacity to reach your own conclusions."
"When time
will pass and you'll draw the conclusions, maybe I will speak," said
Francis. "But I'd like that you do this job in a professional way."
Pope Francis, flanked by Vatican spokesperson Greg Burke,
listens to a journalist’s question Aug. 26, 2018, during a news conference
aboard the flight to Rome at the end of his two-day visit to Ireland.
(AP/Gregorio Borgia, Pool)
Of course, many
headlines read: "Pope refuses to respond to accusations of coverup."
The pope was
correct to encourage journalists to examine the Viganò document to see what is
true and what is not. The press conference was not the place to do a
line-by-line critique of the document. Many reporters have in fact examined the
document and found its claims wanting.
But what about
Viganò's claim that he told the pope about McCarrick?
Since the pope is
the only other witness to this encounter, only he can verify or deny what
Viganò said, and refusing to answer that question does not enhance his credibility.
The pope's media advisers should have told him so immediately after the press
conference and responded to the reporters with a clarification before they
filed their stories.
The answer could
have been, "No, he did not say that to the pope." Or, it could have
been: "Yes, he did say that to the pope, but there is no record of the
alleged sanctions by Benedict. The pope disregarded the accusations because
Viganò had a history of unsubstantiated accusations. And remember, it was
Francis who told McCarrick to spend the rest of his life in prayer and penance
and took away his red hat."
Reporters, like
most people, like the pope, but they also have a job to do. The Vatican should
not make it difficult.
Just as every
diocese in the United States needs to do a full and transparent account of
clerical sex abuse and each diocese’s response, so too the Vatican must
disclose what it knew, when it knew and what it did or did not do. Nothing less
will begin the restoration of credibility to the Catholic Church.
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Jesuit Fr. Thomas
Reese is a columnist for Religion News Service
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