The New York Times has a report about the accusations from Vigano. The National Catholic Reporter also did a fact check on some of Vigano's claims that could be checked and found that at least some of the things he said appear to be false and others could not be verified.
The short version is that Vigano is an "arch-conservative" with an ideological bone to pick.
Pope Francis, the Accusations and the Back Story (New York Times)
Aug. 27, 2018
LONDON — For people who are not immersed in the doctrines and politics of the Roman Catholic Church, the uproar over new accusations against Pope Francis can be hard to parse — a mix of the sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the church, and bitter factional infighting over its direction.
How closely those two factors are related is unclear, as is the credibility of the allegations against the pope. But at a time when the church is enduring an international crisis, largely over generations of sexual misconduct and cover-ups, the suggestion that Francis was in any way complicit could pose a threat to his papacy.
Here, then, are answers to some of the big questions raised by the controversy.
What has the pope been accused of?
An archbishop, Carlo Maria Viganò, released a letter claiming that Pope Francis, his predecessors and others in the church hierarchy knew of sexual misconduct by Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the archbishop of Washington, years before it was made public.
Archbishop Viganò said he told Francis in 2013 that the pope’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, had ordered Cardinal McCarrick “to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance” because of the accusations against him. But Francis, Archbishop Viganò wrote, empowered Cardinal McCarrick, allowing him to help choose American bishops.
Cardinal McCarrick was forced to resign last month, and Archbishop Viganò said the pope must resign, too. The pope said he would not dignify questions about the claims with a response.
The letter was timed to coincide with the pope’s visit to Ireland, where the church has struggled to fashion an effective response to revelations of clerical abuse and cover-ups that have severely damaged its authority. Francis, after being criticized for appearing to play down similar allegations in Chile and elsewhere, has worked hard in recent months to be seen as taking them more seriously.
Archbishop Viganò, the Vatican envoy to the United States until Francis removed him in 2016, has long been at odds with the pope and has campaigned against what he sees as the pernicious influence of gay priests. His letter not only accused church leaders, by name, of covering up clerical misconduct, but also claimed that some of them are gay.
He has cast the church’s abuse scandals as a problem stemming from homosexuality, claiming that a gay cabal is corrupting the institution from within.
That history, and some inconsistencies in accounts of the events Archbishop Viganò described, have prompted questions about how concerned he really is about the handling of Cardinal McCarrick and whether he is more interested in using the case as a cudgel against a pontiff he opposes.
What are the ideological divisions in the church?
The most volatile disputes have to do with social issues on which public opinion in Western countries has moved away from church teaching — among them homosexuality, abortion, divorce and remarriage.
The pope’s defenders say it is less a matter of changing church doctrine than of how the church treats people who have broken with that doctrine. Critics say Francis is undermining established and immutable principles.
Francis sent shock waves through the Catholic world soon after his election as pope in 2013 by saying, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” He did it again less than two months later, saying that the church “cannot be obsessed” with issues like abortion, homosexuality and birth control.
His 2016 statement on the family urged priests and congregations to be more welcoming of people it long castigated as sinners, and to focus more on social missions like caring for the poor. And he broke with tradition in proposing a less centrally governed church, urging elements of the church around the world to find their own approaches to difficult issues.
The church also still has older, simmering ideological disputes dating to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. There are archconservatives within the church who oppose the changes made since then, like having priests celebrate Mass in languages other than Latin and allowing them to place communion wafers in parishioners’ hands rather than on their tongues.
Who opposes Francis within the church, and why?
There is a sizable faction of traditionalist prelates who have resisted the pope’s moves to liberalize the church to accommodate modern attitudes — which they see as a weakening of doctrine. They include Cardinals Gerhard Müller and Walter Brandmüller, who are German; Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, an American; and Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, an Italian who died last year, among others.
“There are bishops who like what Pope Francis is doing, bishops who don’t like what Pope Francis is doing and hope he goes to his eternal reward, and bishops who are just confused by Pope Francis,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest who writes for The National Catholic Reporter. “Certainly the ones who don’t like him, who are most ideological, are the most vocal.”
But it is not just bishops who object to what Francis has done. Last year, dozens of Catholic scholars signed a public letter critiquing the pope’s statement on the family.
Much of the opposition is ideological, but the pope’s defenders say some of it is about raw power.
Francis has sometimes ignored the recommendations of conservatives high in the church in appointing archbishops and cardinals, and he has campaigned against “clericalism,” the primacy of the church hierarchy’s authority. He has pointedly rejected some of the privileges of his office, declining to live in the Apostolic Palace.
“He was criticizing the way priests and bishops around the world had been living and operating for many years,” said John Thavis, an author of books on the church and its leaders. “The progressives were very pleased, and the traditionalists were disturbed.”
Haven’t there always been disputes?
There have been doctrinal disputes for as long as there has been a church, but they tended to be kept under wraps.
Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who led the church for 35 years, not only slowed the pace of change after the Second Vatican Council, but also enforced strict discipline among bishops and theologians in seminaries.
Francis, on the other hand, upending conservatives’ expectations, has repeatedly invited dissent — and they have obliged him.
Former ambassador Vigano accuses Vatican of covering up McCarrick scandal for years (National Catholic Reporter)
KNOCK, Ireland — A former Vatican ambassador to Washington has published an 11-page letter filled with accusations against dozens of former and current high-level officials in the Catholic Church, claiming there was a systemic cover-up of allegations that now former cardinal Theodore McCarrick was sexually abusing seminarians.
Archbishop Carlo Vigano, who served as the Holy See's chief diplomat in the U.S. capital from 2011-2016, also claims that Pope Benedict XVI had placed unannounced sanctions on McCarrick, barring him from celebrating Mass publicly or traveling, and ordering him to a life of prayer and penance.
In an unprecedented broadside by a Vatican diplomat against a sitting pontiff, Vigano then accuses Pope Francis of ignoring the imposed sanctions and calls on him to resign in order to "set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses."
Although the Vatican press office said it would have "no immediate comment" on the letter, released by National Catholic Register and LifeSiteNews early Aug. 26, at least several of its claims appear contradicted by the historical record.
McCarrick, for example, was seen celebrating numerous public Masses throughout Benedict's papacy and continued traveling around the world until the announcement in June that the Vatican had ordered his removal from ministry over an accusation of abuse that had been deemed credible.
Benedict also did not hesitate to act publicly when another cardinal, Scotland's Keith O'Brien, was accused of improper sexual relationships. In that case, Benedict accepted O'Brien's resignation and his decision not to attend the 2013 conclave that elected Francis.
Beyond his factual claims, Vigano's letter is laced as well with ideological claims about other Catholic prelates. He says one, for example, has a "pro-gay ideology" and that another "favored promoting homosexuals into positions of responsibility."
McCarrick, who led the Washington archdiocese from 2000-06, became the first U.S. prelate to renounce his position in the College of Cardinals July 28.
NCR has chosen not to name prelates identified by Vigano in his report except in cases where the officials were known to be his or McCarrick's direct superiors or predecessors, due to the inability to corroborate the former ambassador's account.
Vigano claims that two of his predecessors in Washington, Archbishops Gabriel Montalvo and Pietro Sambi, "did not fail" to notify the Vatican about allegations against McCarrick as early as 2000, the year when Pope John Paul II appointed McCarrick archbishop of the capital city.
Vigano says Sambi forwarded one specific accusation against McCarrick to the Vatican's then Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in 2006. The accusation, Vigano says, was made by a priest of the Charlotte diocese who was laicized for abusing minors.
The former ambassador says he wrote a report on the accusations in his role at the time as the Vatican's Delegate for Pontifical Representations, which was given to Bertone and now Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, who was then Bertone's second-in-command and is now head of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches.
Vigano says his report was "kept by my superiors, and was never returned to me with any actual decision by the superiors on this matter." He says he raised the issue in a second memo in 2008, which was also never answered.
But he says he then learned sometime later from Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, then the head of the Congregation for Bishops, that his second memo had an effect.
"Pope Benedict had imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis," states Vigano. "The Cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance."
Vigano says he does not know when Benedict took his alleged action against McCarrick, but suggests it happened in 2009 or 2010. He blames the delay on the former pontiff's action on Bertone.
The former ambassador also alleges that Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who took over leadership of the Washington archdiocese after McCarrick's resignation for reasons of age in 2006, was informed of the sanctions placed on his predecessor.
Wuerl's spokesman, Ed McFadden, said in a statement to Catholic News Agency that the cardinal "did not receive documentation or information from the Holy See specific to Cardinal McCarrick’s behavior or any of the prohibitions on his life and ministry suggested by Archbishop Vigano."
The former ambassador claims he brought up the allegations against McCarrick with Francis for the first time in 2013, about three month's after the pope's election as pontiff. He said he told the pope that the Congregation for Bishops had a dossier on the prelate and that he had "corrupted generations of seminarians and priests."
Vigano then claims that Francis had made McCarrick "free from all constraints" and allowed him to travel and give lectures, but cites no evidence of any sort of papal directive overturning Benedict's alleged earlier imposition of sanctions.
"Pope Francis has repeatedly asked for total transparency in the Church and for bishops and faithful to act with parrhesia," states the former ambassador. "The faithful throughout the world also demand this of him in an exemplary manner. He must honestly state when he first learned about the crimes committed by McCarrick, who abused his authority with seminarians and priests."
Vigano's tenure in Washington ended in controversy when his name surfaced in questions over how Francis came to meet a Kentucky county clerk who defied a U.S. federal court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples during his 2015 visit to the U.S.
Francis accepted Vigano's resignation from his diplomatic post in April 2016, about three months after the prelate reached the traditional retirement age of 75.
Vigano himself has also been accused of covering up sexual misconduct.
Three months after his departure from Washington, a 2014 memo he had written ordering the quashing of an investigation into alleged homosexual activity on the part of now former St. Paul-Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt was made public at the conclusion of a criminal investigation.
Vigano had also ordered the destruction of a piece of evidence. Nienstedt resigned from his post in 2015.
Release of the former ambassador's letter came as Francis was on an Aug. 25-26 visit to Ireland, hours before Francis was expected to have his traditional press conference with journalists on the flight back to Rome.
And NPR has this report on the Pope's visit to Ireland:
Pope Ends Visit To A Disillusioned Ireland, Where Church Authority Has Plunged
Back in 1979, Pope John Paul II arrived in Ireland to an outpouring of love, affection and enormous crowds, including an estimated 1.2 million people for a Mass in Dublin's Phoenix Park.
. . .
Francis spent the weekend in a radically different Ireland than the one John Paul II encountered. It is richer, more educated, more secular — and deeply disillusioned after revelations of widespread clerical sexual abuse, the cruelty of church-run workhouses that took children away from their unwed mothers and repeated church cover-ups.
When John Paul II visited, weekly Mass attendance in Ireland was around 80 percent and homosexuality was illegal. Today, Mass attendance hovers around 35 percent. In 2015, Irish people voted to legalize same-sex marriage. Ireland's Taoiseach, or prime minister, Leo Varadkar, is openly gay. In May, two-thirds of voters went against church doctrine and cast ballots to remove a constitutional amendment banning abortion.
"Most people here in Ireland have changed their views on the church due to the hurt and the neglect that's been caused," said Catherine Malone, Carmel's daughter, who wheeled her mother to the sidewalk to see the pope. "Ireland was such a poor country back in 1979, but so much was expected from us. We were really bullied into donations every week."
Whereas the last papal visit was a national celebration, some people at Francis' Sunday Mass in Phoenix Park were a little defensive amid all the criticism of the church as it continues to grapple with what has become a global sexual abuse crisis. Sarah O'Rourke, who teaches religion in a Roman Catholic primary school, went to witness Francis' message so she could bring it back to her students, the vast majority of whom don't attend Mass. She brought her family but didn't tell several acquaintances because she thought they might be critical.
. . .
The pontiff's message of contrition was marred by a new allegation: Over the weekend, a former Vatican official accused Francis of ignoring sexual misconduct allegations for years against an American cardinal and called on him to resign. In an 11-page letter, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò — a former Vatican ambassador to Washington — said he had told the pope five years ago that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., faced extensive allegations of sexual misconduct.
Viganò said the pope did nothing. McCarrick resigned last month, but he maintains his innocence. The pope dismissed Viganò's letter, which took the form of a political attack and, according to the National Catholic Reporter, contained factual errors.
"Read the statement carefully and make your own judgment," the pope told reporters. "I will not say a single word on this."
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare
