The Snakes of Ireland

I know I'm at risk of being the Papal Apologizer, but this is particularly ugly:

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 U.S. Church officials of covering up the case of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned last month in disgrace.

Archbishop Vigano was papal nuncio (ambassador) to the U.S., so you'd think this was particularly damning, especially since:

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.

And, as no less than Reuters says:

The statement was the latest blow to the credibility of the U.S. Church. 

Well, maybe; but not quite in the way Reuters means it.  A little counterpoint, courtesy of Vox:

An arch-conservative known for his opposition to LGBTQ issues, Viganò was removed from his office in 2016 after brokering a secret meeting, without the pope’s consent, between Francis and Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk whose refusal to sign same-sex marriage licenses briefly made her a hero in conservative circles.

His letter, at times, conflates consensual homosexual behavior — itself prohibited by the Catholic Church — with abuse (at one point, Viganò says that “the homosexual networks present in the Church must be eradicated”). His letter reflects what Massimo Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University and a commentator on Catholic issues, previously characterized as an increased willingness on the part of conservative, anti-Francis Catholics to see the latest developments in the sex abuse scandal as an opportunity to advocate for a changing of the guard. In demanding church leaders up to the pope himself resign, Viganò and other Catholic conservatives are using the scandal as an “opportunity to reform the Church from abuses as a counter-revolution ... against the Church of Vatican II itself,” Faggioli told Vox in an email, referencing a 1962-1965 council many conservatives see as pushing the Vatican in a discomfitingly liberal direction.

You can stop with the first clause of the first sentence, and get the idea a grain or two of salt is required for this story.  Vigano was removed from his office in 2016 by....well, Francis, supposedly.  2 years later, Vigano uses the occasion of the Pennsylvania report to release a statement while the Pope is in Ireland  (which has its own abuse scandals it is rightly angered over) to slip a shiv in the Pope's robes and demand his resignation post-haste.

Sure, this is how things are done when your only interest is justice and faithfulness to the witness of Christ.  Right?

Vigano wrote that he told Francis: “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of 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.”

Vigano wrote he was surprised to find that McCarrick started travelling on missions on behalf of the church soon thereafter, including to China. McCarrick was also one of the Vatican’s intermediaries in the U.S.-Cuba talks in 2014.

Vigano’s claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that McCarrick enjoyed a fairly public retirement. Vigano provides no evidence that such sanctions were imposed by Benedict in any official capacity, saying only that he was told they were.

It's worth noting McCarrick resigned as a cardinal after a U.S. church investigation found charges of sexual abuse to be based on credible evidence.  It undoubtedly should have been earlier, but there is that issue of "credible evidence."

Vigano is a guy who wants to undo Vatican II.  His open letter is, quite frankly, more gossip and conspiratorial speculation than a sound statement of what he personally knows:

Pope Benedict’s same dispositions were then also communicated to me by the new Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, in November 2011, in a conversation before my departure for Washington, and were included among the instructions of the same Congregation to the new  Nuncio.

In turn, I repeated them to Cardinal McCarrick at my first meeting with him at the Nunciature. The Cardinal, muttering in a barely comprehensible way, admitted that he had perhaps made the mistake of sleeping in the same bed with some seminarians at his beach house, but he said this as if it had no importance. The faithful insistently wonder how it was possible for him to be appointed to Washington, and as Cardinal, and they have every right to know who knew, and who covered up his grave misdeeds. It is therefore my duty to reveal what I know about this, beginning with the Roman Curia.

Cardinal Angelo Sodano was Secretary of State until September 2006: all information was communicated to him. In November 2000, Nunzio Montalvo sent him his report, passing on to him the aforementioned letter from Father Boniface Ramsey in which he denounced the serious abuses committed  by McCarrick.

It is known that Sodano tried to cover up the Father Maciel scandal to the end. He even removed the  Nuncio in Mexico City, Justo Mullor, who refused to be an accomplice in his scheme to cover Maciel, and in his place appointed Sandri, then-Nuncio to Venezuela, who was willing to collaborate in the cover-up. Sodano even went so far as to issue a statement to the Vatican press office in which a falsehood was affirmed, that is, that Pope Benedict had decided that the Maciel case should be considered closed.  Benedict reacted, despite Sodano’s strenuous defense, and Maciel was found guilty and irrevocably condemned.

Was McCarrick’s appointment to Washington and as Cardinal the work of Sodano, when John Paul II was already very ill? We are not given to know. However, it is legitimate to think so, but I do not think he was the only one responsible for this. McCarrick frequently went to Rome and made friends everywhere, at all levels of the Curia. If Sodano had protected Maciel, as seems certain, there is no reason why he wouldn’t have done so for McCarrick, who according to many had the financial means to influence decisions. His nomination to Washington was opposed by then-Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re. At the Nunciature in Washington there is a note, written in his hand, in which Cardinal Re disassociates himself from the appointment and states that McCarrick was 14th on the list for Washington

Sounds like somebody lost the political fight somewhere in there, and is still nursing a grudge over it.  Yes, there are rumors of McCormick taking seminarians to his bed; yes, this is an ugly period in the church, and must blame much fall on many people.  But Vigano rather clearly wants the blame to fall on Francis, the sooner to be rid of this meddlesome Pope.  After listing off all the cardinals and other high church officials who, he claims, knew about McCarrick (and perhaps they did), Vigano tips his hand:

As far as the Roman Curia is concerned, for the moment I will stop here, even if the names of other  prelates in the Vatican are well known, even some very close to Pope Francis, such as Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio and Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who belong to the homosexual current in favor of subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality, a current already denounced in 1986 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then-Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the Letter to the  Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.  Cardinals Edwin Frederick O’Brien and Renato Raffaele Martino also belong to the same current, albeit with a different ideology.  Others belonging to this current even reside at the Domus Sanctae Marthae.

This is where Vigano begins to sound like the anti-Papists of my childhood, who told me how the priests raped the nuns and buried the resulting infants (after abortions, of course!) behind the convent walls.  Granted, the stories of abuse lend some credence to that hysteria, but they don't make it any more credible than what Vigano alleges, nor any more credible than his allegations.  There's a lot of breathlessness around this horror:  The Daily Beast columnist who seems to wish the entire church hierarchy would burst into flames claimed the Pope was "silent" when the Vatican didn't respond to the grand jury report the day it was issued, then reviled the Pope's response, then predicted dire events surrounding his trip to Ireland where he couldn't "hide" from the ongoing revelations.  Given Ireland's recently revealed history of abuse from the Church and it's break with the Church, including a vote to legalize abortion, it didn't seem Francis was hiding at all to go there.  But while there were demonstrations, cathedrals weren't burned, the Pope wasn't assassinated, and the priests were driven out of the country like snakes.  Now this story, written to maximally inflame the furor and point expectantly toward a Pope resigning in disgrace, seems to have more to do with Vatican politics than Papal responsibilities.

I appreciate the problems of the Pope's position:  maximum responsibility without the authority to simply sweep away all who are guilty or appear to be guilty or are thought guilty in a headline, a headline forgotten days later.  It is well to remember there are those in the church who are not interested in justice so much as power, who want to use whatever crisis arises as a chance to kill the king, so to speak, and to retrench and even re-write (and undo) Church history.

The worst part is what a disservice this does to the victims, whose claims are lost in the clamor, whose need for help is ignored in the rush to seize power, whose wounds are not tended by the shepherds of the sheep, whose misery is used merely as another tool by selfish and arrogant men; the same kind of men who harmed them in the first place.