At Last, a Reckoning?

Did somebody just tear the roof off this sucker?

That somebody would be Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who, by all appearances, has cracked open the Vatican cone of silence and exposed what just might be a Church-wide conspiracy to cover up the sex crimes of the disgraced and degenerate former archbishop of Washington, D.C., Theodore Cardinal McCarrick (about whom see our final New Oxford Note “‘Uncle Ted’ McCarrick: Queen Pin of the Lavender Mafia,” Sept.). Viganò, a retired Italian archbishop who served as apostolic nuncio to the U.S. from 2011 to 2016, dropped an 11-page written testimony this August that hit the Catholic world like an atomic bomb. Veteran Vatican watchers have called it “shocking,” “inflammatory,” “explosive,” and even “apocalyptic.”

In his letter, published in the U.S. by EWTN’s flagship publication National Catholic Register (simultaneously with LifeSiteNews.com), Viganò accuses Pope Francis of enabling McCarrick by lifting the canonical sanctions Pope Benedict XVI had placed on him, which Viganò says he explained to McCarrick in person in 2011. Those sanctions, which McCarrick evidently routinely ignored, entailed a ban on travel and public speaking, including celebrating Mass in public and giving lectures; vacating the seminary where he was living; and dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penitence. But Francis, shortly after assuming the papal throne, freed the sex offender to do whatever it was he liked to do, which Francis allegedly knew then, and the world knows now, was seducing seminarians and raising large sums of money.

But that’s not all. According to Viganò, Francis gave even greater succor to the pedophile prelate. He made McCarrick “his trusted counselor,” despite knowing full well that McCarrick was a serial predator. And Francis “continued to cover” for McCarrick, despite the fact that Viganò personally briefed Francis in 2013 about the charges against McCarrick, telling him the cardinal had “corrupted generations of seminarians and priests.” But, Viganò writes, the new Pope expressed zero interest in the Congregation for Bishops’ “thick” dossier on McCarrick. Instead, Francis “covered for him to the bitter end” and only took action against McCarrick “when he was forced by the report of the abuse of a minor…to save his image in the media.”