Accusation against pope not consistent
Cardinal was target of sanctions that were not enforced for years
At a gala dinner in the luxury Pierre Hotel in Manhattan in 2012, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, Pope Benedict XVI’s top diplomat in the United States, bestowed an award for missionary service on Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and praised him as “very much loved from us all.”
But if Viganò is to be believed, he was keeping a troubling secret — a claim that is at the heart of a new scandal that has thrown the Roman Catholic Church into upheaval and led some conservatives to call for Pope Francis to resign.
The archbishop now says he was aware at the time of the gala that McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, was under orders from Benedict to stop appearing in public on behalf of the church because he had sexually abused adult seminary students.
Viganò did not explain why he agreed to publicly laud a cardinal under sanctions. But LifeSiteNews — a website run by conservative Catholics — quoted the archbishop Friday as saying that he could not back out of the event.
Even beyond the gala dinner, however, a review of McCarrick’s activities during the years he was supposedly restricted under Benedict showed that he visited seminaries and ordained new priests, officiated at Masses and traveled the world representing the church.
A week ago, Viganò released a letter saying Benedict had ordered McCarrick to retire to a life of prayer and penance and had barred him from celebrating Mass in public, traveling for church business, giving lectures and participating in public meetings.
But after Francis became pope, in 2013, he lifted the sanctions and made the cardinal a trusted adviser, the letter claimed. That accusation has stunned the faithful, leaving many clamoring to know whether Francis — who has vowed to rid the church of sexual abuse — had covered up for an abuser or whether Viganò, a detractor of Francis’ who was removed from his post, was lying.
What remains unclear is whether Benedict ever imposed sanctions on the cardinal. And if he was sanctioned but permitted to flout the restrictions so boldly and for so long, it raises questions of how tough the Vatican really is on bishops implicated in sexual abuse.
One explanation given by church analysts is that he had been under sanctions but they were not taken seriously because the accusations against him were of sexual misconduct with adults, not children. Canon lawyers said in interviews that while church law treats sexual abuse of minors as a crime, on adults the law is ambiguous.
Francis has reacted to the new revelations by refusing to discuss the matter and neither confirmed nor denied the allegations in the Viganò letter.
The Viganò letter has pitted Francis against Benedict, the emeritus pope, who stepped down in 2013 — confirming the worst fears of Catholics who warned that having two popes living as neighbors in the small, intrigue-laden footprint of Vatican City would be dangerous to the church.