Pope Francis has said he does not remember if he was told about Theodore McCarrick’s predations. In an interview with Valentina Alazraki, the Pope was asked whether he had been told it by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who claims he informed the Pope on June 23, 2013. The Pope told Alazraki: “When [Viganò] says he spoke to me that day he came … I do not remember if he told me about this. If it is true or not. No idea!”
Originally, this was missing from the Vatican News website’s Italian transcript. It only included a section where the Pope said, “Of McCarrick I did not know anything, obviously, nothing, nothing. I said that several times, that I did not know, no idea.”
It comes as more details emerge of McCarrick’s relationship to the Vatican. Last week, a priest who had worked closely with McCarrick, Mgr Anthony Figueiredo, revealed correspondence which suggests that Pope Benedict barred McCarrick from public appearances, but he flouted the rules.
What commentators said
At Catholic Culture, Phil Lawler was puzzled by the Pope’s forgetting. “If you told me that you studied French in high school, I might not recall that fact five years later; it wouldn’t stand out in my mind. But if you told me that you had wrestled a grizzly bear, whether or not I believed you, I would certainly remember the claim. Is the Pope suggesting that the news Archbishop Viganò says he conveyed – that a cardinal-archbishop had been bedding seminarians, and had been ordered by the previous pontiff to retire from public life – would not have made a lasting impression?”
Archbishop Viganò went further, telling LifeSite: “What the Pope said about not knowing anything is a lie.” Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press observed that Viganò had claimed that “Francis disregarded information that McCarrick preyed on seminarians” and that Francis “rehabilitated” McCarrick from Benedict’s restrictions. “As a result, Francis’s claim to not remember if Viganò told him about McCarrick now amounts to his defence against such criticism.”
At Crux, which co-published along with CBS the revelations contained in the documents, John Allen examined another angle: that of what Cardinal Donald Wuerl, at the time Archbishop of Washington DC, knew and when he knew it. Allen pointed to “an August 25, 2008, letter from McCarrick to the late Italian Archbishop Pietro Sambi, at the time the Vatican’s ambassador in the US, referring to an earlier letter in which the Vatican restrictions were outlined. McCarrick said he wanted to discuss some points in that letter ‘having shared it with my Archbishop’, meaning Wuerl.”
McCarrick’s comments would suggest that Cardinal Wuerl was acquainted with some of the details of McCarrick’s case – although Wuerl has always denied such knowledge. A spokesman repeated that denial to Crux. “The clear implication,” Allen wrote, “is that McCarrick was lying in his letter to Sambi, misrepresenting the extent to which Wuerl was informed and supportive.
“Right now, that’s basically a he said/he said situation, leaving observers to choose between two figures each with apparent motives to be less than fully candid.”
The dispute between Pope Francis and Archbishop Viganò also seemed to rest on a “he said/he said standoff”, Allen wrote – “and again, the only way to resolve it would be through an independent examination of the records. The Vatican promised such a review in early October, but to date there’s been no sense of when we might expect its results to be made public.” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, has said an inquiry is ongoing, and that “once this work is done, there will be a declaration.” But it all underlines that there is still “unfinished business from the abuse scandals”, Allen wrote. “Accountability” was the biggest remaining issue – “not for the crime but the cover-up.”
At the National Catholic Register, Fr Raymond de Souza struck a slightly more optimistic note. Mgr Figueiredo’s revelations, he wrote, “suggest what a new culture of whistleblowing might look like”. The Holy Father’s new laws on abuse were designed to encourage whistleblowing, and this seemed to have encouraged Mgr Figueiredo.
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