Papal sex abuse scandals condemned as Catholic Church’s own September 11
Allegations involving US ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick are now being called an ‘open secret’, as Pope Francis blames Satan
Pope Francis will meet on Thursday with a delegation of United States cardinals and bishops over the sex abuse and cover-up scandal roiling the Catholic Church and his own papacy, the Vatican said on Tuesday.
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, has said he wants Francis to authorise a full-fledged Vatican investigation into ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was removed in July after a credible accusation he groped a teenager. DiNardo has also said recent accusations that top Vatican officials – including the pope – covered up for McCarrick deserve answers.
Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said DiNardo would meet with Francis on Thursday in the Apostolic Palace, along with Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Francis’ top sex abuse adviser. Also involved are two officials from the US conference, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez and Monsignor Brian Bransfield, according to a Vatican statement.
Francis in July ordered McCarrick, 88, to a lifetime of penance and prayer pending the outcome of a canonical trial into the groping allegation involving a teenage altar boy in the 1970s. After the allegation was publicised in June, it emerged that it was apparently an open secret – including at the Vatican – that McCarrick routinely invited seminarians and young priests into his bed and harassed them.
The McCarrick scandal took on crisis proportions two weeks ago after the Vatican’s former US ambassador, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, accused two dozen Vatican and US cardinals and bishops of covering up for McCarrick for two decades. Specifically, Vigano accused Francis of rehabilitating McCarrick from canonical sanctions imposed on him by Benedict 2009 or 2010.
The Vatican hasn’t responded to the accusations, but presumably the “clarifications” it has promised will come sometime after Francis meets with the top US church leadership this week.
Francis has refused to comment directly about Vigano’s claims, but nearly every day over the past two weeks his homily at morning Mass has seemed somewhat related to the scandal.
On Tuesday, he drew Satan into the fray, suggesting that the devil was behind Vigano’s revelations.
“In these times, it seems like the ‘Great Accuser’ has been unchained and has it in for bishops,” he said. “True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalise the people.”
Today, even the Catholic Church looks full of confusion at its ... own September 11
Bishops, he said, should be men of prayer, and should know they were chosen by God and keep close to their flock.
In other eyebrow-raising comments on Tuesday, a top aide to both Francis and Benedict said the sex-abuse scandal was such a game-changing catastrophe for the church that it amounted to the church’s “own September 11.”
Archbishop Georg Gaenswein told a book presentation that he by no means was comparing the scandal to the nearly 3,000 people killed in the US 17 years ago on September 11, 2001.
But he said the years-long scandal, and recent revelations in the Pennsylvania grand jury report, showed just “how many souls have been wounded irrevocably and mortally by priests from the Catholic Church.”
“Today, even the Catholic Church looks full of confusion at its own ... own September 11, even though this catastrophe isn’t associated with a single date but rather at so many days and years, and innumerable victims,” he said.
While no one has attacked churches with aeroplanes full of passengers, Gaenswein said, recent news from the US “sends a message that is even more terrible than the sudden collapse of all the churches of Pennsylvania together with the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington”.
Gaenswein, who serves as secretary to Benedict and prefect of Francis’ papal household, was speaking at a presentation of a book by conservative American author Rod Dreher, who has been at the forefront in reporting on the recent scandal over McCarrick and Vigano.
Gaenswein recalled that during a 2008 trip to the US, Benedict spoke from the National Shrine to denounce the “profound shame” and pain that abuse had caused the Catholic community. Benedict is credited with having turned around the Vatican on the issue of sex abuse while he was cardinal, forcing bishops around the world to send all their cases to him for review because they weren’t sanctioning abusers.
Gaenswein’s said Benedict’s admonition was “apparently in vain, as we see today”.
“Neither the lament of the Holy Father nor the formal assurances and commitments pledged by a large part of the hierarchy has been able to contain the evil,” he said.
