Another Vigano letter

Archbishop Vigano fired another shot across Pope Francis's bow yesterday, releasing another letter with one or two new details and some additional charges.  Rod Dreher has provided the text in English.  This letter is considerably shorter than the first one, but if you don't want to read the whole thing, Crux highlights the parts sure to stir controversy.   Among them:

• Vigano situates Francis's alleged rehabilitation of former-Cardinal McCarrick as one of a series of instances in which "Pope Francis has defended homosexual clergy who committed serious sexual abuses against minors or adults."  Vigano names three other examples, of which the most recognizable name surely is Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor.
• He states that Francis has refused the request of the US bishops to conduct an investigation of McCarrick's crimes; the idea here is that bishops can't compel one of their peers to cooperate with an investigation, but the pope has that authority
• He named Cardinal Ouellet of Quebec as his source for Pope Benedict's alleged previous discipline of McCarrick

We should expect that this letter will trigger new rounds of investigation and speculation as journalists try to confirm (or discredit) Vigano's new accusations.  The timing is unfortunate for Francis, whose Synod on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment begins in less than a week.

If this topic is of interest, I encourage you to go to the Dreher link I provided above the break and read the entire statement (Crux refers to it as a letter, but Dreher's term "statement" seems more accurate).  Whatever you think of Vigano and his motives in making these public charges, there is something compelling about the document.   It strikes me as filled with anguish.  If it is a hit piece (which seems an accurate enough characterization), it's not written or structured the way that hit pieces get manufactured in the US.

There is something almost Pauline about the way that it begins with a prayer of thanksgiving.  He then spends a few paragraphs justifying his previous public statement.  In the course of that apologia, he admits something that various commentators have noted (and some have grumbled about): publishing these names and details entails a violation of the pontifical secret, which is tantamount to making classified information public.  In doing so, Vigano believes he is answering to a higher law:

Certainly, some of the facts that I was to reveal were covered by the pontifical secret that I had promised to observe and that I had faithfully observed from the beginning of my service to the Holy See. But the purpose of any secret, including the pontifical secret, is to protect the Church from her enemies, not to cover up and become complicit in crimes committed by some of her members. I was a witness, not by my choice, of shocking facts and, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states (par. 2491), the seal of secrecy is not binding when very grave harm can be avoided only by divulging the truth. Only the seal of confession could have justified my silence.

He then takes on Francis directly:

Now, the pope’s reply to my [previous] testimony was: “I will not say a word!” But then, contradicting himself, he has compared his silence to that of Jesus in Nazareth and before Pilate, and compared me to the great accuser, Satan, who sows scandal and division in the Church — though without ever uttering my name. If he had said: “Viganò lied,” he would have challenged my credibility while trying to affirm his own. In so doing he would have intensified the demand of the people of God and the world for the documentation needed to determine who has told the truth. Instead, he put in place a subtle slander against me — slander being an offense he has often compared to the gravity of murder. Indeed, he did it repeatedly, in the context of the celebration of the most Holy Sacrament, the Eucharist, where he runs no risk of being challenged by journalists. When he did speak to journalists, he asked them to exercise their professional maturity and draw their own conclusions. But how can journalists discover and know the truth if those directly involved with a matter refuse to answer any questions or to release any documents? The pope’s unwillingness to respond to my charges and his deafness to the appeals by the faithful for accountability are hardly consistent with his calls for transparency and bridge building.

I've been an admirer of Francis since Day 1 of his pontificate, and I can't say the same about Vigano - really, until he released his first statement a few weeks ago, I didn't know sufficiently of him to have any sort of feeling for him, positive or negative.  But I have to admit that there is a certain force to his arguments here.

This new statement reinforces my view of Vigano and his "testimony": it seems to me that he is motivated by malice.  But by no means does that discredit the specific claims he's making.  Sometimes, telling the truth can be an act of malice, and I don't think we can discount the possibility that Vigano is engaging in malicious truth-telling.  Whatever the truth of his claims, his poison pen is injuring Francis' reputation.  As I say, I believe we need to presume that is Vigano's intent (or one of them).  It's quite possible that another intent of his is to do exactly what he's claiming to do here: helping to cleanse and purify the church by telling inconvenient truths.  I am not sure he is doing so in the most effective or least destructive way.  But it may be that, in the long run, the church will be better off for whatever sunlight Vigano manages to cause to shine into dark corners.