Archbishop resigns in wake of US sex scandal
US Cardinal Donald Wuerl, accused of covering up sex abuse crimes by priests, has resigned as archbishop of Washington, the Vatican said yesterday.
Pope Francis accepted the cardinal’s request to step down, a statement said.
“The Holy Father’s decision to provide new leadership to the Archdiocese can allow all of the faithful, clergy, religious and lay, to focus on healing and the future,” Wuerl said in a statement posted on the Washington Archdiocese’s website.
“Once again, for any past errors in judgement, I apologise and ask for pardon. My resignation is one way to express my great and abiding love for you the people of the Church of Washington,” he added.
Wuerl had been under growing pressure to resign since the publication in August of a Pennsylvania grand jury report on the abuses committed by 301 priests over a period of 70 years.
The cardinal, who was bishop of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during 1988-2006, was not accused of any crimes, but was named as having been excessively lenient towards child-abusing priests under his watch.
Survivor advocate David Clohessy said that Wuerl’s resignation was long overdue.
“It’s very disappointing,” said Clohessy, according to the Washington Post. “This continues a long, long pattern in the church hierarchy: a refusal to admit what is so clear to the rest of us.”
Clohessy, who is the former national director of Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said that Wuerl committed serious wrongdoing.
“You can claim other bishops are even worse, and there is some truth to that,” he told the Post. “But the simple fact is that he endangered children.”
Wuerl, 78, is the second US cardinal to resign as head of an archdiocese over sex abuse cover-ups, after cardinal Bernard Law, who quit in 2002 as archbishop of Boston in the wake of a major sex abuse scandal.
However, Wuerl’s predecessor as archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, had his cardinal title revoked by the Pope in July, after McCarrick was outed as a serial abuser of young priests and seminarians.