The Catholic Church is struggling for answers

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro has just thrown gasoline on a conflagration raging in the church.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro just threw gasoline on the conflagration that is raging in the Catholic Church.

The man behind the state grand jury that two weeks ago detailed decades of horrific abuse of thousands of children by more than 300 priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses made a guest appearance on the ‘Today’ show Tuesday morning to talk about the findings and the reaction.

That’s when he dropped this little nugget: Shapiro said Vatican officials knew of the efforts to cover up the acts of sexual abuse committed by Pennsylvania priests. The attorney general said he could not “speak directly to Pope Francis” knowing, but noted several indications in the grand jury report where local church officials contacted Vatican officials about reports of abuse by priests.

Any decision to remove a priest from the priesthood must come from the Vatican.

The remarks came just a day after the church hierarchy was roiled by a lengthy letter penned by the former Vatican ambassador to the United States suggesting that Pope Francis had knowledge of allegations made against Washington, D.C. Archbishop Cardinal Theodore McCarrick before his resignation last summer.

The 7,000-word, 11-page letter from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, at one time the Vatican’s top diplomat in the United States, alleges that both Pope Francis and his predecessor, Pope Benedict, had knowledge of sexual misconduct allegations against McCarrick.

Vigano called on the pope to resign. His pronouncement clearly created a rift among church leaders, drawing a line between more liberal members such as the pontiff, and hardline conservatives.

For his part, Pope Francis has tried to downplay the report and said specifically of the letter by his frequent critic, “I will not say a word about it.”

The current Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, has “categorically denied” ever being informed that McCarrick had been sanctioned for sexual misconduct.

Vigano apparently was fueled to go public with his blockbuster allegation in the wake of the latest turmoil enveloping the church stemming from the Pennsylvania grand jury report.

Now a committee created specifically by the church to address the problem of sexual misconduct by priests has weighed in with a blistering statement of its own, calling the failure to stop the abuse an “evil” caused by a “loss of moral leadership.”

The National Review Board concluded that church bishops and leaders can no longer be trusted to address the situation, and also offered a possible solution – involving an unprecedented role for parishioners and other lay people.

The board, which was formed back in 2002 in the wake of the original priest abuse scandal that rocked the Boston Archdiocese, said it was now compelled to let lay people take the lead in any investigation.

“Intimidation, fear and the misuse of authority created an environment that was taken advantage of by clerics, including bishops, causing harm to minors, seminarians and those must vulnerable,” the board said in a statement. “The culture of silence enabled the abuse to go on virtually unchecked.”

In short, the board said the damning scenario painted by the most recent Pennsylvania grand jury report made it clear that the crisis can no longer by fixed by a church hierarchy that has again and again been exposed as engaging in acts meant to cover up abuse and protect the church, as opposed to helping victims and bringing their abusers to justice.

In addition to the outside investigation, the board recommended creating a whistleblower system outside the realm of church leaders and bishops that would field claims of abuse and report them directly to law enforcement and the Vatican.

We heartily concur with both steps as badly needed – and long overdue – moves to end the abuse and offer real methods to prevent it from happening again.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) are demanding a truly independent investigation with subpoena power. They called anything less a “sham and a whitewash.”

We’ve seen enough of that now for years.