Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has issued a third intervention about alleged papal mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations made against a senior former cardinal.
In his latest missive, the retired papal nuncio to the United States sets out when written evidence was presented to the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI about Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s behaviour with seminarians, and repeats claims that he verbally told Pope Francis about the matter in 2013.
But in the new intervention he softens his stance on two of the central charges from the original explosive testimony of 26 August.
In the 11-page August document, released halfway through a tense papal visit to Ireland, the former Vatican diplomat said that “Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign.” Now Viganò is taking a different tack, denying he is in an “open and scandalous rebellion” against the Pope, as Cardinal Marc Ouellet accused him of being in an open letter of 7 October.
“I am charged with disloyalty to the Holy Father and with fomenting an open and scandalous rebellion. Yet rebellion would entail urging others to topple the papacy. I am urging no such thing,” the archbishop, a retired member of the Holy See diplomatic corps, writes. “I pray every day for Pope Francis — more than I have ever done for the other popes. I am asking, indeed earnestly begging, the Holy Father to face up to the commitments he himself made in assuming his office as successor of Peter.”
The second shift is over the restrictions he said McCarrick had been placed under by Pope Benedict XVI. On 26 August, the archbishop said that Francis “did not take into account the sanctions Pope Benedict had imposed on [McCarrick]” which entailed a life of prayer and penance and no public ministry.
The implication of the earlier Viganò testimony, which Cardinal Ouellet sought to refute, was that Benedict XVI enforced formal sanctions of prayer and penance, which Francis ignored. In his latest letter Viganò writes: “Cardinal Ouellet disputes that it is false to present the measures taken against McCarrick as ‘sanctions’ decreed by Pope Benedict and cancelled by Pope Francis. True,” Viganò writes. “They were not technically ‘sanctions’ but provisions, ‘conditions and restrictions’.” He goes on: “To quibble whether they were sanctions or provisions or something else is pure legalism. From a pastoral point of view they are exactly the same thing.”
In his letter Cardinal Ouellet admits there had been a private “exhortation” to McCarrick to keep a low profile. In his latest testimony, the archbishop insists that he told Francis on 23 June 2013 that McCarrick had been ordered to “a life of prayer and penance” by Benedict XVI and writes that McCarrick “continued to enjoy the special regard of Pope Francis and was given new responsibilities and missions by him.”
Viganò does not specify what these responsibilities or missions were, nor is there any official record of McCarrick being appointed to any role by Francis.
The archbishop’s latest testimony does allege that written claims about the ex-cardinal’s sexual misconduct with seminarians were lodged with the Vatican on three occasions: in 2000, under John Paul II, and in 2006 and 2008, under Benedict XVI.
It also forcefully maintains his allegation that homosexuality is “the root cause of so much sexual abuse”. “This is a crisis due to the scourge of homosexuality, in its agents, in its motives, in its resistance to reform ... homosexuality has become a plague in the clergy, and it can only be eradicated with spiritual weapons,” he writes.
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