Vatican preparing response to archbishop's accusations

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican is preparing a response to bombshell allegations made by an Italian archbishop who asked Pope Francis to step down, accusing him of covering up sexual misconduct by an American cardinal, his top advisers said on Monday.

The statement came at the end of the first day of a three-day meeting of the “C-9”, a group of nine cardinals from around the world who meet with the pope at the Vatican several times a year to advise him on Church matters.

In an 11-page statement published on Aug. 26, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Vatican ambassador to Washington, launched an unprecedented broadside by a Church insider against the pope and a long list of Vatican and U.S. Church officials.

The cardinals’ statement said they had expressed their “total solidarity with the pope over events of the last few weeks” and added that the Holy See was preparing “eventual and necessary clarifications”.

Viganò said he had told Francis soon after the pontiff’s election in 2013 that Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington D.C., had engaged in sexual misconduct.

Viganò, who is in hiding and communicating through the same conservative journalists who helped him prepare, edit and distribute his broadside, said the pope had done nothing and even lifted sanctions that had been imposed on McCarrick by Benedict, the previous pope.