Pope meets US church leaders as abuse cases hit pontiff’s popularity
Pope Francis met US bishops and cardinals on Thursday to discuss the Vatican’s response to a new wave of claims of sexual abuse by clergy.
The meeting took place a day after an opinion poll revealed fewer than half of Americans supported the pontiff.
The Argentine pontiff met Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston archdiocese and Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who advises the pope on issues relating to sex abuse.
The US Catholic Church has been shaken by a report on sexual abuse by clergy in Pennsylvania and the resignation in July of US Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
Mr McCarrick was accused of sexually abusing a teenager while a priest in New York in the 1970s.
According to a poll published by CNN on Wednesday, Pope Francis’s popularity has nosedived in the US recently.
The poll showed that only 48 per cent of Americans in general supported the pontiff, and his popularity also plummeted among US Catholics to 63 per cent, from 83 per cent 18 months ago.
A former ambassador to the Holy See, Mons Carlo Vigano, demanded the pope’s resignation, accusing him of covering up for Mr McCarrick.
On Thursday, the pope accepted the resignation of US Bishop Michael Bransfield and ordered an investigation into allegations he sexually harassed adults, his Baltimore diocese said.
Archbishop Georg Ganswein, private secretary to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, on Tuesday described sexual abuse by clergy as the Church’s “own 9/11”.
Mr DiNardo said he wanted to present an “action plan” to the pope to allow reporting of abuse and misconduct by bishops.
In the McCarrick case, Mr DiNardo called for a “prompt and thorough examination ... into how the grave moral failings of a brother bishop could have been tolerated for so long and proven no impediment to his advancement”.
Police on Tuesday arrested a priest in Mr DiNardo’s Texas diocese after allegations he abused a male high school student between 1998 and 2001. The priest, Manuel La Rosa-Lopez, is also accused of abusing a 16-year-old girl in 2001.
Her parents “decided not to pursue the matter” and left the country, and the priest was allowed to resume his duties in 2004 after an internal investigation, the statement read.
In the US, a group of 5,000 Catholic chief executives has frozen $820,000 (Dh3.01 million) paid annually to the Holy See pending clarification of the abuse cases.
Although Pope Francis has refused to respond to Mr Vigano’s allegations so far, the Vatican said on Monday he was “formulating the eventual and necessary clarifications”.
Among those targeted by Mr Vigano, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the Archbishop of Washington and formerly a bishop in Pennsylvania, is accused of covering up the sexual abuse in that state.
Mr Wuerl said he plans to travel to Rome in the near future to meet Pope Francis and discuss his resignation.
On Wednesday, the pontiff called for a meeting of all the heads of Catholic bishops’ conferences worldwide at the Vatican in February to discuss the “protection of minors”.
More cases are coming to light.
The conclusions of a study commissioned by the Church in Germany revealed that priests sexually assaulted more than 3,600 children there across nearly seven decades.
A group of 5,000 Catholic chief executives has frozen $820,000 (Dh3.01 million) paid annually to the Holy See