Pope Francis is staying silent over a former Vatican official’s letter that accuses him of covering up claims of sexual abuse and calls on him to resign.
“I will not say a word about that,” the pontiff said Sunday during his landmark visit to Ireland.
“Read the statement carefully and judge it for yourselves,” he told reporters aboard his plane, according to Agence France-Presse. “You have sufficient journalistic capacity to draw conclusions. When a little time has passed and you have the conclusions, perhaps I will talk.”
In an 11-page letter, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Vatican ambassador to the United States, claimed he told the pontiff in 2013 that Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, then-archbishop of Washington, DC, was “a serial predator.” He offered no proof of the alleged conversation.
“He knew he was a corrupt man,” Viganò wrote. “He covered for him to the bitter end.”
Viganò, long a fierce critic of Francis, claims that he had been told that Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, imposed sanctions on McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 after a decade’s worth of allegations of misconduct had reached the Vatican.
“The cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate Mass in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance,” Viganò wrote of the Benedict sanctions.
The current archbishop of Washington on Monday “categorically denied” ever being informed that Pope Benedict had sanctioned his predecessor for sexual misconduct.
Donald Cardinal Wuerl would have presumably known about the sanctions since McCarrick lived in his archdiocese.
The record shows that McCarrick lived a life devoid of any such restriction in those years.
He traveled widely, including for Catholic Relief Services, the humanitarian branch of the US church. He also visited Rome with the entire US Conference of Bishops for their once-every-five-year visit in 2012, and was even on hand for Benedict’s final general audience in 2013.
Despite these facts, Viganò has insisted that the Holy Father should resign to set an example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses.
McCarrick, who is now 88, resigned last month after a US church probe found “credible” allegations that he had sexually assaulted seminarians and minors, including an 11-year-old boy.
Viganò’s letter was released a day before the pope begged for forgiveness over child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
With Wires
