DUBLIN (CRUX) – Just hours after Pope Francis condemned the “repugnant crimes” of sexual abuse by clergy during his two-day trip to Ireland, news broke in the United States that a former papal ambassador to the country is accusing Pope Francis of having known about abuse allegations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and failing to act.
More than that, Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò asserts that Pope Francis actually repealed sanctions imposed on Cardinal McCarrick by Pope emeritus Benedict XVI in the late 2000s, despite the fact that Archbishop Viganò personally briefed Pope Francis in June 2013 about Cardinal McCarrick and the charges of misconduct and abuse.
The news was first reported by veteran Catholic journalist Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register in tandem with another conservative outlet, LifeSiteNews.
In an 11-page statement on Saturday, the 77-year-old Archbishop Viganò called on Pope Francis to resign. Pentin has made the full text of the statement available here.
“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 to Cardinals and Bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them,” he wrote.
Archbishop Viganò served as the Papal Nuncio to the United States from October 2011 to April 2016, serving both Popes Benedict and Francis.
In the statement, Archbishop Viganò said he met the newly elected Pope Francis on June 23, 2013, about Cardinal McCarrick, the former archbishop of both Newark and Washington D.C., who resigned last month over claims he sexually abused seminary students and an altar boy.
Archbishop Vigano said he told Pope Francis about the allegations: “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.”
The reference is to the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, responsible for assisting the pope in the supervision of Catholic bishops around the world.
Archbishop Viganò offered details about the penance he says was imposed by Benedict.
“The cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living,”Archbishop Viganò wrote, “he was also 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.”
Archbishop Viganò says that he doesn’t know exactly when those measures were decreed, but that it occurred in 2009 or 2010.
Also according to Archbishop Viganò, earlier efforts by other papal envoys to the United States to bring the charges against Cardinal McCarrick to Rome’s attention were obstructed in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, blaming Italian Cardinals Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone – the Secretaries of State for Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, respectively.
Archbishop Viganò also asserts that Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., knew about the accusations against Cardinal McCarrick, saying “I myself brought up the subject with Cardinal Wuerl on several occasions” and asserting that “the Cardinal lies shamelessly.”
In a recent interview, Cardinal Wuerl vigorously asserted that he had been unaware of either the abuse charges against Cardinal McCarrick or previous settlements for misconduct with seminarians in the dioceses of Metuchen and Newark in New Jersey.
“All the time that [McCarrick] was here and certainly all the time that I’ve been here, there was never any news,” Cardinal Wuerl said. “If I could tell you no one ever came to me and said this person did this to me. No one. No one.”
In a statement to the Catholic News Agency, the cardinal’s spokesman Ed McFadden said, “Cardinal Wuerl 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 Viganò.”
McFadden said that “Cardinal Wuerl categorically denies that he was ever provided any information regarding the reasons for Cardinal McCarrick’s exit for the Redemptoris Mater Seminary.”
“Archbishop Viganò presumed that Wuerl had specific information that Wuerl did not have,” the spokesman said.
Under Pope Francis, Archbishop Viganò claims, sanctions against Cardinal McCarrick were lifted and the former Washington prelate went to become a “kingmaker” for personally appointments both in the US and in the Vatican. Among other things, Archbishop Viganò credits Cardinal McCarrick for having “orchestrated” the appointments both of Cardinal Blase Cupich in Chicago and Cardinal Joseph Tobin in Newark.
Yet despite the memo’s strong protestations, Archbishop Viganò himself has been accused of his own mishandling of sex abuse allegations.
According to a 2014 memo, first made public in 2016, as nuncio he quashed an investigation into then-Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis who was being investigated for misconduct with seminarians, as well as cover-up of sexual abuse. In 2015, then-Archbishop Nienstedt stepped down as head of the archdiocese.
This is not the first time Archbishop Viganò has cast himself in the role of a Vatican whistle-blower.
In 2012, letters from Archbishop Viganò to Pope Benedict XVI and Bertone were at the heart of the initial “Vatileaks” scandal, involving confidential documents stolen from the German pope’s desk and leaked to journalist by his personal butler. In the letters, Archbishop Viganò protested his appointment as envoy to the United States, claiming he was being punished for attempting to clean up financial corruption in his previous role as the number two official in the Government of the Vatican City State.
Those charges were denied by the Vatican at the time, claiming that they were “the result of erroneous assessments, or fears based on unsubstantiated evidence, even openly contradicted by the main characters invoked as witnesses.”