Doubts cast on claim of coverup by Vatican

Pope refuses to comment on archbishop’s allegation

The archbishop of Washington on Monday “categorically denied” ever being informed that his predecessor had been sanctioned for sexual misconduct, undercutting a key element of a bombshell allegation that Pope Francis covered up clergy abuse.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl issued a statement after the Vatican’s former ambassador to the United States accused Pope Francis of effectively freeing ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick from sanctions in 2013 despite knowing of McCarrick’s sexual predations against seminarians.

Wuerl’s denial corresponds with the public record, which provides ample evidence that McCarrick lived a life devoid of ecclesiastic restriction after the sanctions were said to have been imposed in 2009 or 2010. That suggests that former pope Benedict XVI either didn’t impose sanctions or never conveyed them in any official way to the people who could enforce them — or that McCarrick simply flouted them.

The claims of the former Vatican ambassador, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, have thrown Francis’s papacy into crisis, undermining once again his insistence that he is intent on ridding the church of sex abuse and coverup.

The core of Vigano’s charge against Francis rests on what sanctions, if any, Benedict imposed on McCarrick and what if anything Francis did to alter them, when armed with the same knowledge of McCarrick’s misdeeds that Benedict had.

Vigano, who was Vatican ambassador from 2011 to 2016, said he had been told that Benedict imposed sanctions on McCarrick starting in 2009 or 2010, after a decade’s worth of allegations of misconduct involving adult seminarians had reached the Vatican. Vigano said he informed Francis of the sanctions in a meeting on June 23, 2013.

Despite the reported sanctions, McCarrick travelled widely, including for Catholic Relief Services, the humanitarian branch of the U.S. church, and celebrated mass publicly.

The Vatican did not immediately respond Monday when asked to confirm or deny the existence of any sanctions imposed by Benedict. Francis, for his part, declined to confirm or deny Vigano’s claims when asked by reporters on a flight home from Ireland on Sunday. “I won’t say a word about it,” Francis said, urging journalists to read Vigano’s text and come to a judgment themselves.