‘At peace,’ pope accuser says
Love of church behind claim pontiffs hid abuses, he says.
VATICAN CITY — The author of the accusation that Pope Francis covered up sex abuse broke his silence Wednesday and insisted that he didn’t act out of revenge or anger but out of love for the Catholic Church.
In comments carried on the blog of Italian journalist Aldo Maria Valli, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano said he was “serene and at peace” after publishing his declaration, albeit saddened by subsequent attempts to undermine his credibility.
In accusations published Sunday, Vigano said Francis and before him Pope Benedict XVI knew of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual preying on seminarians. The claims have thrown Francis’ papacy into crisis. They have undermined the pontiff’s claim of having “zero tolerance” for sex abuse and have fueled an ideological divide that has long split the church and intensified under Francis.
Vigano, the retired Vatican ambassador to the U.S., said Francis should resign over his complicity in the McCarrick scandal, though Vigano’s denunciations also implicate Benedict and a host of high-ranking U.S. and Vatican officials going back two decades.
Valli, a Vatican expert with state-run RAI television, has said Vigano twice arrived at his home to consult with him in the weeks leading up to publication of his accusation. Another conservative Italian journalist, Marco Tosatti, helped Vigano edit the 11-page document and arranged for its publication in Italian, English and Spanish-language media.
In the Valli interview, Vigano revisited old Vatican controversies that marked his career and explained that he decided to go public now because the denunciation he had made confidentially to three cardinals in 2012 never was acted on.
It was a reference to the 2012 investigation commissioned by Benedict into the leaks of confidential documents that became known as the “Vatileaks” affair. Benedict’s then-butler, Paolo Gabrieli, was convicted of stealing the papers and leaking them to an Italian journalist who published them in a blockbuster book.
Vigano, long a divisive figure in the Vatican, figured in the investigation because some of his letters lamenting his transfer to the Washington embassy were leaked.
While the investigation’s outcome has never been revealed, its findings were so important that in their first meeting after Francis’ March 13, 2013, election, Benedict and the new pope were seen sitting across from each other with a white box between them holding documentation from the investigation, being handed off from one pope to the next.
Francis made no reference to Vigano’s denunciation at his general audience Wednesday, his first Vatican appearance since the accusations were made.
In recounting his recent trip to Ireland, Francis lamented how Irish church authorities had failed to respond to the crimes of priests who abused.
U.S. bishops, as well as rankand-file Catholics, have called for an independent investigation to find out who knew about McCarrick’s misdeeds, and how he was able to rise through the ranks even though it was an open secret that he regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house and into his bed.
Francis last month removed McCarrick as a cardinal and ordered him to live a lifetime of penance and prayer after a U.S. church investigation determined that an allegation that he groped a teenage altar boy in the 1970s was credible.