Pope Francis
leads the World Meeting of Families closing mass in Phoenix Park, Dublin,
Ireland, on August 26, 2018. (Reuters)
A former top Vatican official has accused Pope
Francis of having known of allegations of sex abuse by a prominent US cardinal
for years and called on him to resign, in an unprecedented broadside against
the pope by a Church insider.
In a detailed 11-page bombshell statement given
to conservative Roman Catholic media outlets during the Pope's visit to
Ireland, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano accused a long list of current and past
Vatican and US Church officials of covering up the case of Cardinal Theodore
McCarrick, who resigned last month in disgrace.
In remarkably blunt language, Vigano said alleged
cover-ups in the Church were making it look like "a conspiracy of silence
not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia".
"Pope Francis has repeatedly asked for total
transparency in the Church," wrote Vigano, who has criticised the pope
before.
"In this extremely dramatic moment for the
universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the
proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a
good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and
resign along with all of them," he said.
Vatican officials declined immediate comment on
Sunday on the statement, which was published by the National Catholic Register
and several other conservative media outlets in the United States and Italy.
Vigano said he had told Francis in June 2013,
just after he was elected pope by his fellow cardinals, about the accusations
against McCarrick.
Vigano, the papal envoy in Washington from 2011
to 2016, also said he had informed top Vatican officials as early as 2006 that
McCarrick was suspected of abusing adult seminarians while he was a bishop in
two New Jersey dioceses between 1981 and 2001. He said he never received a response
to his 2006 memo.
He also accused McCarrick's successor as
archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, of having been aware of the
abuse allegations. Wuerl has said he did not know of them.
The statement was the latest blow to the
credibility of the US Church. Nearly two weeks ago, a grand jury in
Pennsylvania released the findings of the largest-ever investigation of sex
abuse in the US Catholic Church, finding that 301 priests in the state had
sexually abused minors over the past 70 years.
TRT World's Simon McGregor-Wood
has this report.
Resignation
McCarrick in July became the first Cardinal in
living memory to resign his position in the Church leadership after a review
concluded that claims he had sexually abused a 16-year-old boy were credible.
He was one of the highest-ranking church
officials accused of sex abuse in a scandal that has rocked the 1.2
billion-member faith since reports of priests abusing children and bishops
covering up for them were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002.
Since then patterns of widespread abuse of
children have been reported across the United States and Europe, in Chile and
Australia, undercutting the Church's moral authority and taking a toll on its
membership and coffers
McCarrick, 88, has said he had no recollection of
alleged abuse of the minor but has not commented on widespread media reports
that he would force adult men studying for the priesthood to sleep with him at
a beach house in New Jersey.
Vigano's statement railed against
"homosexual networks present in the Church" -- the word
"homosexual" appears 18 times, while the word "child"
appears only twice, in both cases in the titles of Church documents Vigano
sites.
Francis asked for forgiveness on Sunday during
his highly charged visit to Ireland for the "scandal and betrayal"
felt by victims of sexual exploitation by Catholic clergy. On Saturday he said
the corruption and cover-up of abuse amounted to human excrement, according to
victims.
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