Pope to meet U.S. cardinals
VATICAN CITY — With the Catholic Church in crisis once again over clerical sex abuse and coverup, Pope Francis will meet Thursday with U.S. cardinals and bishops who are demanding to know how one of their own was able to climb the clerical ranks despite allegations that he slept with seminarians.
The Vatican said Tuesday that the U.S. delegation would be headed by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and also include Francis’ top sex abuse adviser, Cardinal Sean O’Malley.
DiNardo has said he wants Francis to authorize a full-fledged Vatican investigation into ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned as cardinal in July after a credible accusation that he groped a teenager.
The Vatican has known since at least 2000 that McCarrick would invite seminarians to his New Jersey beach house and into his bed.
And yet St. John Paul II made him archbishop of Washington and a cardinal in 2001, presumably because Vatican officials impressed by his fundraising prowess considered his past homosexual activity a mere “moral lapse” and not a gross abuse of power.
DiNardo has also said recent accusations that top Vatican officials — including the current pope — covered up for McCarrick since 2000 deserve answers.
Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said DiNardo and O’Malley would meet with Francis on Thursday in the Apostolic Palace. Also involved are two officials from the U.S. conference, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez and Monsignor Brian Bransfield, according to a Vatican statement.
The summit recalls the April 2002 meeting John Paul called with the senior U.S. church leadership after the sex abuse scandal first exploded publicly in Boston. At the time, McCarrick served as the frontman for the U.S. delegation, acting as their spokesman, and then went on to serve prominently when U.S. bishops drafted their tough abuse norms the summer of 2002 in Dallas.
In July, Francis ordered McCarrick, 88, to observe a lifetime of penance and prayer pending the outcome of a canonical trial into the groping allegation involving a teenage altar boy in the 1970s. After the allegation was publicized in June, it emerged that it was apparently an open secret — including at the Vatican — that McCarrick routinely molested seminarians and young priests and harassed them.
The McCarrick scandal took on crisis proportions two weeks ago after the Vatican’s former U.S. ambassador, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, accused two dozen Vatican and U.S. cardinals and bishops by name of covering up for McCarrick.
Specifically, Vigano accused Francis of rehabilitating McCarrick from canonical sanctions imposed on him by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 or 2010. The Vatican hasn’t responded to the accusations, but presumably the “clarifications” it has promised will come sometime after Francis meets with the top U.S. church leadership this week.
Francis has refused to comment directly about Vigano’s claims, but nearly every day over the past two weeks his homily at morning Mass has seemed somewhat related to the scandal.
On Tuesday, he drew Satan into the fray, suggesting that the devil was behind Vigano’s revelations.
“In these times, it seems like the ‘Great Accuser’ has been unchained and has it in for bishops,” he said. “True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalize the people.”