Vatican diplo slams pope
Rips McCarrick ‘cover-up’
A former top ambassador from the Vatican to the US has written a scathing letter accusing Pope Francis of covering up sex abuses alleged against Archbishop Theodore McCarrick.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, 77, wrote in an 11-page testament that in the late 2000s, Pope Francis repealed sanctions against McCarrick — the former archbishop of Newark and Washington, DC — that had been imposed by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.
Francis and all others implicated in the cover-up of McCarrick’s abuses should resign, he wrote.
Francis “continued to cover” for then-Cardinal McCarrick, not only failing to “take into account the sanctions that Pope Benedict had imposed on him,” but even elevating McCarrick, making him “his trusted counselor,” Vigano wrote, according to the Catholic News Agency.
Vigano served as apostolic nuncio in Washington from 2011 to 2016.
Benedict had “imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis,” Vigano noted.
Vigano said in his letter that his “conscience dictates” that the truth be known. “The corruption has reached the very top of the church’s hierarchy,” he wrote. McCarrick was ultimately barred from public ministry June 20. The order came from Francis.
An investigation by the New York archdiocese had found that sex-abuse allegations against McCarrick were “credible and substantiated.”
Francis on Saturday, before the report was released, described his “pain and shame” over the “repellent crimes” of the sex-abuse scandal that is roiling the Catholic Church, and pledged to put an end to clergy exploitation of children.
“The failure of ecclesiastical authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others — adequately to address these repellent crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community,” Francis (left) said in a speech to Irish political and religious leaders in Dublin.