Dublin: On the final day of Pope Francis’ mission to Ireland, as he issued wrenching apologies for clerical sex abuse scandals, a former top Vatican diplomat claimed in a letter published on Sunday that the pope himself had joined top Vatican officials in covering up the abuses and called for his resignation.
The letter, a bombshell written by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigan, the former top Vatican diplomat in the United States and a staunch critic of the pope’s, seemed timed to do more than simply derail Francis’ uphill efforts to win back the Irish faithful, who have turned away from the church in large numbers.
Its unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks amounted to an extraordinary public declaration of war against Francis’ papacy at perhaps its most vulnerable moment, intended to unseat a pope whose predecessor, Benedict XVI, was the first pontiff to resign in nearly 600 years.
Vigan claimed that the Vatican hierarchy was complicit in covering up accusations that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians and that Francis knew about the abuses by the now-disgraced American prelate years before they became public. Yet, the letter contended, Francis did not punish the cardinal, but instead empowered him to help choose powerful American bishops.
In a news conference on the papal plane back to Rome late Sunday evening, Francis was asked whether there was any truth to the claim that Vigan had personally informed him in 2013 of McCarrick’s history of abuse. He was also asked whether Benedict had sanctioned the American cardinal, as the letter also claimed. The pope did not deny it, but sidestepped the questions by insisting he would not dignify them with a response.
“I will not say a single word about this,” he said. “I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have the sufficient journalistic ability to make your conclusions. It’s an act of trust.”
The 7,000-word attack on Francis’ allies in the Vatican, published early Sunday Dublin time by several conservative Catholic outlets antagonistic to the pope, represented a steep escalation in the long-standing, and increasingly caustic, rivalries within the church.
Factions have battled over the direction the church has gone under Francis, with conservatives, especially some US cardinals and bishops, warning that his pastoral and inclusive approach and emphasis on social issues dilute church doctrine and pose a mortal threat to the future of the faith.
Already on Sunday afternoon, the battle was being joined.
Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, who is aligned with Francis and was a target of Vigan’s letter, said in a phone interview that he suspected English speakers had helped Vigan write the letter. He called the pope “a man of integrity.”
“If he makes a mistake, he admits it,” Cupich said. “That’s why I’m convinced this is something that he is going to respond to in an appropriate way.”
Cupich also said the timing of the letter raised questions.
“I’d have to leave it up to him to ask him why he timed the release of this at this moment, particularly if he considered this information so very critical and important,” the cardinal said.
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia, a leading conservative voice in the Catholic Church, who according to the letter was disparaged by Francis, vouched for Vigan’s integrity in a statement from his spokesman.
The willingness of the pope and his allies to reach out to gay Catholics has infuriated conservatives, many of whom, like Vigan, blame homosexuals for the sex abuse crisis. The pope has argued that the abuse is a symptom of a culture of privilege and imperviousness among priests who value the church’s traditions over its parishioners.
Last month, Francis accepted the resignation of McCarrick, the first such resignation in living memory, after The New York Times and other news outlets published accounts of the alleged abuse and an internal investigation by the American church deemed credible an accusation that he had sexually abused a minor.
Vigan said that Benedict had already punished McCarrick for his abuse of seminarians and priests. The archbishop writes that Benedict had banned the cardinal from publicly celebrating Mass, from living in a seminary and from travelling to give lectures.
There is no public record of such a sanction, and the cardinal continued to celebrate Mass. And in 2012, McCarrick joined bishops in the Vatican to sing happy birthday to Benedict as they presented him with a fresh strawberry-and-kiwi custard cake.
Cupich said he was not aware of any restrictions that Benedict put on McCarrick, as Vigan asserts.
“How can you have secret restrictions? What does that mean?” Cupich said, adding that it would have been Vigan’s duty as nuncio to inform the American bishops of the restrictions. “Why didn’t he tell us this?” he asked. “Why didn’t he enforce it?”
Vigan accused Francis of failing to apply the sanctions on McCarrick and instead rehabilitating and entrusting him to help choose powerful US bishops, including Cupich.
Vigan despises many of those bishops, who now wield influence and promote Francis’ pastoral approach, and he complained in the letter of being deprived of the voice typically given to a papal nuncio in choosing them. He targeted those bishops and cardinals by name, but saved his strongest fire for Francis.
“He knew from at least June 23, 2013, that McCarrick was a serial predator,” Vigan wrote.
“In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church,” he wrote, “he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them.”
Vigan, who blames gays for the child abuse crisis that has destroyed the church’s standing in many countries, dedicated entire sections of the letter to outing cardinals who he claims belong to what he characterises as a pernicious “homosexual current” within the Vatican.
“These homosexual networks,” he wrote, “which are now widespread in many dioceses, seminaries, religious orders, etc, act under the concealment of secrecy and lies with the power of octopus tentacles, and strangle innocent victims and priestly vocations, and are strangling the entire church.”
Vigan is no stranger to stirring trouble in the Vatican.
A cultural conservative born into a wealthy family in Varese, Italy, he received the title of archbishop from Pope John Paul II in 1992. He later joined the church’s diplomatic corps, one of the traditional sources of power in the Vatican, which gave him access to much of the information he alleges in the letter. In 2009, he was installed by Pope Benedict XVI as secretary of the governorate of Vatican City State, a position similar to mayor of Vatican City. Benedict wanted him to enact government overhauls, but Vigan’s efforts in pursuit of that goal earned him powerful enemies.
In early 2011, hostile anonymous articles attacking Vigan began appearing in the Italian news media, the bulletin board of Vatican power politics. Vigan appealed to Benedict’s second in command, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who instead echoed the articles’ complaints.
Those appeals and protests, later leaked by the pope’s butler, became the heart of the church scandal known as VatiLeaks, which many church observers say contributed to Benedict’s resignation.
Vigan’s letter, while especially inconvenient for the pope, who spent Sunday morning praying for abuse victims at a shrine in Knock, Ireland, also goes after a broad array of current and past Vatican officials and US prelates. He names all of them.
He said his predecessors in the Vatican’s embassy in Washington, now all deceased, knew about McCarrick’s alleged relationships with seminarians and priests and had reported it to the Vatican, but that successive secretaries of state — Angelo Sodano, Bertone and Pietro Parolin — did nothing.
Some survivors of clerical abuse called the allegations a distraction.
“This is infighting between curia factions that are exploiting the abuse crisis and victims of clergy sexual abuse as leverage in the struggle for church power,” said Peter Isely, a survivor. “The sexual abuse crisis is not about whether a bishop is a liberal or a conservative. It is about protecting children.”
The controversy over the allegations is expected to grow in coming days, especially as Francis has declined to deny it.
Instead on Sunday’s flight, he blamed the media for promoting an “atmosphere of guilt” around suspected clerics and shared that until his visit he “had never heard” about Ireland’s notorious mother and baby homes, where children were ripped away from unwed mothers.
He also sought to strike the same conciliatory tone that hundreds of thousands of faithful heard earlier in the day as he began a Mass at Phoenix Park in Dublin by explicitly asking forgiveness for the church’s sins and abuse.
“Some members of the hierarchy didn’t own up to these painful situations,” he said at the Mass. “And kept silent.”
