A month on, the Holy See is preparing to address the archbishop’s ‘testimony’
On Monday, the “C9” Council of Cardinal Advisers, gathered in the Vatican for their 26th working session, issued a statement expressing “full solidarity” with Pope Francis “in the face of what has transpired in recent weeks” and noting that the Vatican is “about to formulate the eventual and necessary clarifications”.
“What has transpired” is: the former apostolic nuncio to the United States, Carlo Maria Viganò, published an explosive 11-page “testimony” late last month, alleging a systematic and decades-long cover-up of abuse and misconduct committed by the disgraced former Archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick.
Fundamentally, however, the substance of any eventual clarification will at best offer details.
We already know that Fr Boniface Ramsey OP sent at least two letters complaining of the then Cardinal McCarrick’s behaviour with seminarians: one in the year 2000, another in 2015. There should be reports on file from the apostolic nunciature in the US, regarding settlements reached between the Archdiocese of Newark and the Dioceses of Trenton and Metuchen, on the one hand, and three of McCarrick’s victims. Those reports should have gone to Rome no later than 2006.
If they are there, then the question is: why did Francis not see them long ago? Or did he in fact see them? If they’re not there, then that is the story.
Either of the former two possibilities – they’re there and he saw them, they’re there and he didn’t – would suggest that Francis has at the very least a nonchalance with regard to normal and expected administration, if not toward the general moral culture of the clergy. The final possibility – that they are not there – would bespeak a rot even more profound and pervasive than that which is envisioned in Archbishop Viganò’s already shocking testimony.
The short version of this story is: if Pope Francis did not know about McCarrick, he should have.
The longer version is that Pope St John Paul II certainly should have known about McCarrick and ought never to have put him in the See of Washington, DC, while Benedict XVI did know about him, and apparently took at best a set of half-measures that in any case proved unenforceable. The records of Francis’s predecessors in these regards require the most rigorous public scrutiny, so that the whole People of God may render candid judgment.
Nevertheless, Francis is Pope now.
The Roman Pontiff is the supreme pastor and governor of the Church on earth. If the protestations of ignorance from the US hierarchy with respect to the rumours about the disgraced former cardinal are unacceptable, then so are the Pope’s. He ought to have known, or made it his business to know – and if the curia is as rotten as it would have to be in order for him to have been kept invincibly in the dark, then he must answer for that.
While we are on the subject of curial reform, it is worth mentioning that the statement from the C9 also contained the following item:
The Council of Cardinals, in the first meeting of its 26th session, making ready to deliver to the Holy Father the proposal for the reform of the Roman Curia elaborated in the first five years of activity, in view of the work’s prosecution, decided to ask the Pope for a reflection on the labours, the structure, and the composition of the Council itself, also taking into account the advanced age of some members.
That’s solid Vaticanese by any measure, but it does not require great art to parse: the C9 is looking for an infusion of fresh blood.
Several members of the body are embroiled in scandal. Cardinal Parolin has been criticised for pursuing rapprochement with communist China and is named in the Viganò testimony detailing the alleged McCarrick cover-up. Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga continues to face scrutiny over his governance of the Tegucigalpa archdiocese, where there have been reports of financial mismanagement and where an auxiliary bishop resigned earlier this year amid allegations of sexual impropriety with seminarians. (The cardinal denies any wrong-doing.)
The work of drafting a new apostolic constitution is supposedly complete. Even if several members of the Council were not embroiled in scandal, it would not be unreasonable to ask for new pairs of eyes to take a look.
The first gathering of the Council’s 26th working reunion was almost a rump session. The 77-year-old Cardinal George Pell of Australia was absent on leave, as he continues to fight sex abuse charges – which he vigorously denies – back home. The 85-year-old Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, who has been accused of a cover-up in connection with the case of Chile’s most notorious abuser priest, Fernando Karadima – charges Errázuriz also strenuously denies – and the 78-year-old Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo of Kinshasa were both absent without explanation.
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