Even for non-practicing Catholics, Pope Francis’ tone-deaf refusal to comment even a “single word” on allegations that he personally covered up for a sexual predator makes it almost impossible to ignore the institutional rot and arrogance that has reached the highest levels of the church. Archbishop Carlo Vigano, the former chief Vatican diplomat in the United States issued a scathing indictment this week of the entire Roman Catholic hierarchy, accusing the church of effectively having been taken over by a mafia-like collection of high-ranking church officials who are determined to reverse church teaching on homosexuality and coddle predatory behavior amongst homosexual priests. The overall anti-homosexual theme of Vigano’s testimony explains why the media has paid less attention to it than the recent Pennsylvania grand jury report (recent headlines from the New York Times, “Vatican Power Struggle Bursts Into Open as Conservatives Pounce.”,“Francis Takes High Road As Conservatives Pounce, Taking Criticisms Public.”). Vigano’s letter also claims that Cardinal McCarrick “orchestrated” the installation of a cardinal named Blase Cupich over the archdiocese in Chicago. Cupich was alleged to be one of the Cardinals who was part of the pro-homosexual cabal in the Catholic hierarchy who was responsible for sheltering abusive priests. Over the course of June and July, the church took a number of disciplinary actions against McCarrick, after a church tribunal discovered credible evidence that McCarrick had engaged in sexual abuse of at least one teenage boy. Then, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago made the claim that Pope Francis shouldn’t comment on the scandal since he has “a bigger agenda. He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church. We’re not going to go down a rabbit hole on this.” Of course, there’s this…VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis wants concrete action to combat the “emergency” of plastics littering seas and oceans. Francis made the appeal in a message Saturday to galvanize Christians and others to work to save what he hails as the “marvelous,” God-given gift of the “great waters and all they contain.” He said efforts to fight plastics litter must be waged “as if everything depended on us.” Why not focus on cleaning up the garbage in your church first?
Reporting by the Boston Globe newspaper exposed widespread abuse and how paedophile priests were moved around by Church leaders instead of being held accountable. It prompted people to come forward across the US and around the world.
A Church-commissioned report in 2004 said more than 4,000 US Roman Catholic priests had faced sexual abuse allegations in the last 50 years, in cases involving more than 10,000 children – mostly boys.
A 2009 report found that sexual and psychological abuse was “endemic” in Catholic-run industrial schools and orphanages in Ireland for most of the 20th Century.
Now, a letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, alleges that Pope Francis himself had joined top Vatican officials in covering up the abuses and called for his resignation.
Archbishop Viganò, the former chief Vatican diplomat in the United States, worked with the reporter Marco Tosatti, who helped flush out the 7,000-word letter that called for the resignation of Pope Francis, accusing him of covering up sexual abuse and giving comfort to a “homosexual current” in the Vatican.
Archbishop Viganò claimed that the Vatican hierarchy was complicit in covering up accusations that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians and that Pope Francis knew about the abuses years before they became public. Yet, the letter contended, Francis did not punish the cardinal but instead empowered him to help choose powerful American bishops. “He knew from at least June 23, 2013, that McCarrick was a serial predator,” Archbishop Viganò wrote.
Archbishop Viganò, who blames gays for the child abuse crisis that has destroyed the church’s standing in many countries, dedicated entire sections of the letter to outing cardinals who he claims belong to what he characterizes as a pernicious “homosexual current” within the Vatican.
“These homosexual networks,” he wrote in the letter, “which are now widespread in many dioceses, seminaries, religious orders, etc., act under the concealment of secrecy and lies with the power of octopus tentacles, and strangle innocent victims and priestly vocations, and are strangling the entire church.”
“Now that I have finished, I can leave, and leave Rome too,” Archbishop Viganò told Mr. Tosatti.
A victim of a pedophile priest in Chile has revealed he wrote to the Pope in 2015 about an alleged cover-up after Francis denied getting evidence. Juan Carlos Cruz, a victim of cleric Fernando Karadima in the 1980s, accused fellow priest Juan Barros of witnessing the abuse and doing nothing.
A five-year inquiry into sexual abuse in Australia has released its final report, saying institutions had “seriously failed” to protect children. The royal commission, Australia’s highest form of public inquiry, heard more than 8,000 testimonies from victims of abuse. The accusations covered churches, schools and sports clubs over decades.
Among more than 400 recommendations, the report calls on the Catholic Church to overhaul its celibacy rules. “Tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused in many Australian institutions. We will never know the true number,” the report said. “It is not a case of a few ‘rotten apples’. Society’s major institutions have seriously failed.”
Since 2013, the royal commission has referred more than 2,500 allegations to authorities.
The media’s attempts to cover for Francis should be questioned: the mainstream media was more than happy to expose misconduct inside the Catholic Church when the Pope was a conservative; they surreptitiously facilitate a cover-up when the Pope is a liberal. As a Catholic, you must understand that if the members of the secular media are rabidly defending a papacy accused of sexual abuse cover-ups, it’s not out of love or a fairness for the Church. It’s out of a belief that traditionalist doctrine must be rooted out at any cost, even if that cost is the abuse of minors and the violation of basic canon law.
I left the church years ago, yet, at a deeper level, I wonder how can anyone still sit on the pews on Sunday understanding what the church has been doing. The Church is still a powerful entity, and it still has the ability to do much good in the world. But that cannot happen until it cleanses itself and replaces evil predators with true men, or woman of God.
I was recently hospitalized up this way in the local VA hospital, where there is a Catholic chaplain named “Father Joe,” a well-educated “philosopher” and student of history who makes being in the hospital tolerable, as he is able to converse on a number of subjects, including the church history and structure, which is hardly monolithic.
During my recent stay, we got to discussing the organization of the Catholic church, which is actually composed of many different orders, such as the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Jesuits, etc.
And somehow, that conversation got over onto the topic of pedophile priests molesting children, and boy, did that set him off on a rant.
He was fit to chew nails.
What set him off was the cover-up, and how the cover-up works on the inside.
According to him, the “church” is well aware of these pedophile priests, it sends them to see psychologists and psychiatrists, and then it simply moves them around, never revealing to the new location the history of the priest in the last.
Why?
And that answer is so simple – the church acts to protect itself.
The Pope is supposedly infallible, which is a myth, and the church is supposedly holy, another myth, and those myths must be maintained to protect the church from doubt.
I myself was a Catholic, although I was never molested by any priests.
I ceased being a Catholic in Viet Nam, when the only time we would see a priest, or “sky pilot,” was when we were waiting for the helicopters to take us out to the killing fields where people were going to die.
The “sky pilots” were there to give us absolution from violation of the commandment that thou shall not kill, so that if we got killed, we could go to heaven because we got killed while killing some Godless Commies for Christ.
What rot!
I would turn my back on them and look off in another directions while they intoned their homilies and whatever to the kneeling troops waiting for their blessing.
So really, who can be surprised that the Pope is saying nothing?
What would anyone expect him to do – reveal that the whole thing is a scam?
I was one of their victims in an ad0ption home in the thirties, I had no parents so there was no one to complain too. I was 6 or 7 then. the Priests just knew who to abuse, parents who did not visit their children were their targets. It left a scar on me my whole life, my perseverance I was able to fight it an take it out to anyone that was a threat to me to this day, maybe why I can’t get along with people that cross me, and I’m a loner. But I served my country, obey the law never got into trouble, don’t drink or take drugs, as folks knew me in this town I give away my wealth to the unfortunate, I stay away from the church as much as possible.
I believe Jesus was a homosexual and his disciples also, just my opinion.
Thank you for this thought-provoking post, Mr. Sacco. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time. This statement may seem unfeeling or uncomprehending, but I’ve read that , though these kinds of scars are near-impossible to erase, sometimes, not always and maybe not often, enduring early torment from third parties or a parent (my case) can impel someone to strive to achieve extraordinary accomplishments–in your case, earning, doing good works and sharing your assets with the less fortunate, a rare act. One certainly doesn’t need to be an R.C. to act in this matter.
And I agree with you about the Roman Church–it’s always been run primarily for the benefit of its clergy. However, increasingly, the chickens are coming home to roost.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
it made me stronger to achieve some impossible ideas in life, always learning, since I could not read or write until I was 13 years old, all was self-learning, graduate college with a cum of 3.2,,, 1/2 degree in Anthropology, I was headed to Africa to complete my study when family problems that caused me to delay my study. I’m 92 now, no family, wife died this march, an only child was killed in the streets of NYC. age 18
You have my respect, Anthony Sacco, and I am sorry to her of your wife and child.
I’ll include you and them in my prayers.
And you are living proof that one can arise from great adversity and become a better person for it, which is a necessary lesson in our times where victims who have been diminished and crushed by adversity are now the national heroes.
Some people do find remarkable inner resources to move to a place of forgiveness, but victimization can often leave people, especially children, mistrustful and full of pain for a lifetime. The Catholic church should conduct a thorough investigation from top to bottom, remove all predatory and complicit members that are found, including the Pope, if necessary, and begin a long period of genuine contrition. Anything else is cheap forgiveness and does no service to the people that it hurt.
Doing the right thing is often unpopular, but the truth has a way of eventually persevering, even if it requires multiple lifetimes. The best thing for organizations and people to do is to start honest and stay honest.
For how many decades have observers stated, “The Catholic church should conduct a thorough investigation ….”? It won’t happen. Probably the Roman Church will just break up or dissolve, though not soon enough. Apparently former Roman Catholics are leaving the pews in droves.
Not decades, Don Green, more like hundreds of years
Back in the 1300s, John Wycliffe, an English scholastic philosopher, theologian, Biblical translator, reformer, English priest, and a seminary professor at the University of Oxford was an influential dissident within the Roman Catholic priesthood during the 14th century and is considered an important predecessor to Protestantism.
Wycliffe attacked the privileged status of the clergy, which was central to their powerful role in England.
He then attacked the luxury and pomp of local parishes and their ceremonies.
Wycliffe’s followers were known as Lollards and followed his lead in attacking the very existence of the Papacy.
As I recall, he came to a bad end, because then, as now, the church mounts very vigorous defenses of itself and its privileges and yes, its wealth.
On 4 May 1415, the Council of Constance declared Wycliffe a heretic and banned his writings, effectively excommunicating him retroactively.
The Council also decreed that Wycliffe’s works should be burned and his body remains removed from consecrated ground, which order, confirmed by Pope Martin V, was carried out in 1428 when Wycliffe’s corpse was exhumed and burned and the ashes cast into the River Swift, which flows through Lutterworth.
The Catholic Church is a huge organization with millions of adherents. It will not die overnight. Penn State, on a smaller scale, had the same problem. It had an independent investigation. That might not happen, but I still think it’s the right way to go.
This just in off the press today on this same subject:
A letter from Father Wild regarding residence hall name removal
September 4, 2018
Letter from Father Wild to President Lovell and Board of Trustees
Dear Mike and members of the Marquette Board of Trustees:
As a Jesuit, Catholic priest, I am filled with sorrow and abhorrence at any incident of abuse committed by a religious leader.
While those feelings cannot atone for what people endured who have been sexually abused, I still want to express my regret for their suffering and for the terrible wrongs done by their abusers.
As Provincial Superior of the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) from 1985 to 1991, I was invested with authority over all Jesuits belonging to that particular three-state region.
During my six years in office, accusations of sexual abuse of minors were lodged against three of our members.
Looking back, I would have handled certain aspects of those cases rather differently than I did then.
The restrictive measures I thought quite sufficient to restrain the behavior of one of those priests, for example, proved in practice to be insufficient to do so.
I very much regret that and apologize especially to those victimized for my mistakes in that regard.
In a recent letter to the whole Church, Pope Francis describes the sexual abuse of minors and other vulnerable people as something demonic and cites in that connection Matthew 17:21, where Jesus explains to his disciples, “This class of demons can only be expelled by prayer and fasting.”
After much thought and prayer, and careful consideration, I have decided that one aspect of the “fasting” I should undertake is to formally request that Marquette University remove my name from our new residence hall complex.
Therefore, after careful discussion of the matter with Marquette University’s leadership, I formally request that the University remove my name from the building that was recently named for me.
Sincerely,
Robert A. Wild, S.J.
Lying and corruption are actually stupid because they end up hurting the very organization and people they were supposed to be covering up for. People can be fooled for a while, but only for so long.
Also, you will appreciate this article below (even though it’s only tangentially related to Catholic priests). Not only is honesty is moral, but it can help generate wealth. Generally speaking, there aren’t too many shortcuts.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/04/11/get-rich-with-good-old-fashioned-honesty/
Return all that gold to S. America and leave those children alone.
The Catholic Church is one of the most corrupt organizations on Earth.
Keep going to mass and praying your beads…..you have been duped.
Remember, if good cops cover for bad ones and good priest cover for bad ones…
Where they good to begin with?
Unfortunately, No.
I fell I must apologize to all the grammar and spelling Nazis. I misspelled ‘WERE” and used it’s cousin WHERE.
My God! What is to become of me? Oh My!
LOL!
You’ll probably have to go up to the front of the class and sit on a stool and where a dunce cap while writing on the blackboard a hundred tomes, “where is not were.”
That should teach you a thing or two, anyway.
Maybe you’ll get a rap across the knuckles as well with a ruler just to reinforce the lesson.
Although today, you can claim it is as a result of you being a victim of something or other, in which case, you will likely get a good group cry out of it, and some pats on the head as well, telling you to not worry about it, because who in America today who uses mindless TWITTER has to know how to spell anything or use the right words?
Even Trump doesn’t use the right words in his TWITTER TWEETS to the TWITTERATI, so why should you end being singled out for vocabulary shaming?
get the Grammer correction Application