DUBLIN (AP) — The Vatican's retired ambassador to the United States has penned an 11-page letter accusing senior Vatican officials of knowing as early as 2000 that the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, regularly invited seminarians into his bed but they still promoted him to cardinal.
The letter, an extraordinary j'accuse from a one-time Holy See diplomat, also accuses Pope Francis of having initially rehabilitated McCarrick despite being informed of his penchant for young seminarians in 2013, soon after he was elected pope.
The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published the letter attributed to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano on Sunday as the pope was wrapping up a two-day visit to Ireland.
Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hard-line anti-gay views are well known, also urged the reformist pope to resign over the issue. He and the pope have long been on opposite ideological sides, with the pope more a pastor and Vigano more a cultural warrior.
The Vatican didn't immediately comment on the letter or confirm its authenticity.
In it, Vigano accused the former Vatican secretaries of state under the previous two popes of having ignored detailed denunciations against McCarrick for years. He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer, but that Francis subsequently rehabilitated him.
Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as cardinal last month, after a U.S. church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.
Since then, another man has come forward saying McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary. The accusations have led to a crisis in confidence in the U.S. hierarchy, because it was apparently an open secret that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed.
Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report—which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses—the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.
Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions. His letter identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair, an unthinkable expose for a Vatican diplomat to make. He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.
Vigano, the Vatican's ambassador to the U.S. from 2011-2016, said his two immediate predecessors "did not fail" to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000.
He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on June 23, 2013, at the Vatican's Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.
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.
The letter also contains a lengthy diatribe about homosexuals and liberals in the Catholic church. It often reads like an ideological manifesto, naming all of Francis' known supporters in the U.S. hierarchy as being complicit in a cover-up of McCarrick's misdeeds.
Vigano, however, also has had his own problems with allegations of cover-up, and he and Francis had a major dust-up during Francis' 2015 visit to the U.S., which Vigano organized.
In that incident, a leading U.S. campaigner against gay marriage, Kim Davis, was among those invited to meet with the pope at Vigano's Washingon residence. Francis was so enraged that Davis' supporters had leaked word of her meeting that the Vatican subsequent insisted he only held one private audience while there: with one of his former students, a gay man and his partner.
The cover-up accusation, which Vigano denied, concerned allegations that he tried to quash an investigation into the former archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minnesota, John Nienstedt, who was accused of misconduct with adult seminarians.
In 2016, the National Catholic Reporter said Vigano allegedly ordered the investigation wrapped up and a piece of evidence destroyed. The report cited a 2014 memo from a diocesan official that was unsealed following the conclusion of a criminal investigation into the archdiocese. No charges were filed.
Nienstedt was forced to resign in 2015 over complaints about his handling of sex abuse cases.
Vigano's name also made headlines during the 2012 "Vatileaks" scandal, when some of his letters were published in which he begged to not be transferred to the Vatican embassy in Washington from the central administration of the Vatican City State. He claimed he was being punished for having exposed corruption in the Vatican. The letters showed a clash with Benedict's No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who is also a target of his McCarrick missive.
Editors at America had good reason to believe rumors they heard about McCarrick for many years. Prelates and the Catholic press routinely committed lies of omission.
Carlo has removed any doubt in anyones mind what he and his ilk represent: Clericalism incarnate. This was done for attention and self-glory all the while implicating Popes JPII and B16 and exonerating himself. How utterly predictable.
May Pope Francis remove all Bishops and rebuild the Church. Only then can we be rid of self righteous clerics who believe they are the “chosen” ones...
The scandals in play are a clear mandate for Pope Francis to act swiftly, flush the collossal rot from our Church and be an Acts of the Apostles community
What an extraordinary, utterly contemptible, attempt to derail the pontificate of Pope Francis by the anti-gay mafia within the Catholic hierarchy. If Carlo Maria "Kim Davis" Vigano knew of the McCarrick abuse in 2000, then why did he wait until Pope Francis was in Ireland to drop his caca-bomb (via the monomaniacally homophobic Edward Pentin and LifeSiteNews!)? Why didn't he do it to JPII during his pontificate, or BXVI during his?!!!
This smacks of a cheap attempt by the dubia-type hierarchs to get Pope Francis to resign so that they can elect a hardliner while they still have 50% of the college of cardinals filled with pre-Francis appointees ... within a year or two there will have been an irreversible change to the character of the college, and their hopes of getting an anti-gay hardliner into the cathedra of Rome will have evaporated into the ether.
Vigano, of course, has (probably unintentionally) implicated JPII ... surely his sainthood should be revoked if he was aware of the McCarrick goings-on and responded by making him a cardinal ... though the Maciel Degollado history makes such duplicitous behaviour seem eminently plausible! According to The Tablet, the claim that McCarrick was placed under sanction by BXVI doesn't square with the facts, McCarrick having continued with an active series of pastoral engagements after his retirement ( https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/9649/former-vatican-ambassador-calls-on-pope-to-resign ).
The fear of these ultra-conservatives is driving them to play a dangerous, and ultimately foolhardy, game ... it is as if they feel that their time is running out, and their act of desperation betrays a frenzied, irrational state of mind.
An impartial, no holds barred investigation is mandatory.
The documents are there. You reporters should go find them and expose the whole thing. Let the facts fall where they may.
This is the most explosive claim in my lifetime coming out of such a high-ranking bishop. It is like the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, with names, dates, documents and accusations written in a similar style of AG Josh Shapiro. In the same way as with Grand Juries, none of the accused have had a chance to respond to the accusations, including Pope Francis, so it is possible, even probable, that some innocent have been caught up with the culpable. No doubt, it is heartfelt, as Archbishop Viganò calls on God as his witness (“ready to reaffirm them under oath by calling on God as my witness”), and his desire to give this confession so close to his Judgment day. Here is the link to a pdf of the letter. https://s3.amazonaws.com/lifesite/TESTIMONYXCMVX-XENGLISH-CORRECTED-FINAL_VERSION_-_G-2.pdf
According to some, Vigano is "a trafficker in conspiracy theories who mixes fact, fiction and venom to produce something explosive but also suspicious. When you finish reading this testimony, ... you can only conclude that the product tells us more about the author than it does about the subject ... make no mistake: This is a coordinated attack on Pope Francis. A putsch is afoot ... . The enemies of Francis have declared war." https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/distinctly-catholic/vigano-letter-exposes-putsch-against-pope-francis
The fact trail speaks for itself and God bless this man for speaking the truth. Francis is a bad man. The homosexual underground is a very real thing.
Another gang does not know the Word of God, Matt 10:26 (nothing cannot be hidden..finally)+ on page114 of R.Laurentin,Le demon,mythe ou realite,1995 (not in English), Ch.4.Les modes d'action (of Devil),p.4.Les demon exerce cette forme EXTRAORDINNAIRE sur ...celles qui sont dangereouses pour son regne (inside Seminary)- it is a mystery for Bp-s@Vatican;therefore,....Of course,this author is a little outdated in the case of Marian's apparitions (how to judge them@did not respond to my e-mail) but this old maxim is valid for eternity. Of course, a holy gang behaves like any other (criminal)gang contra the truth of cited Word.In North Am.University run by Jesuits this book was not a shelve because no one has read it for few years and when I wanted it took 2 weeks to transport it from the archives@a clerk could not it find at the desk (after arrival) for two hours ! Is there not "le demon"?