Vigano has been challenging the Vatican, especially Francis, to respond to his original letter, full text here. Recently Vigano challenged the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, to back his story.
On Saturday, the Vatican said that "the Holy Father has decided that information gathered during the preliminary investigation be combined with a further thorough study of the entire documentation present in the Archives of the Dicasteries and Offices of the Holy See regarding the former Cardinal McCarrick, in order to ascertain all the relevant facts, to place them in their historical context and to evaluate them objectively."
However on Sunday, Cardinal March Ouellet issued his own testimony, full text here..
Let us get down to the facts. You say that you informed Pope Francis on 23 June 2013 on the McCarrick case during the audience he granted to you, along with the many other pontifical representatives whom he then met for the first time on that day. I imagine the enormous quantity of verbal and written information that he would have gathered on that occasion about many persons and situations. I strongly doubt that McCarrick was of interest to him to the point that you believed him to be, since at the moment he was an 82-year-old Archbishop Emeritus who had been without an appointment for seven years. In addition, the written brief prepared for you by the Congregation for Bishops at the beginning of your service in 2011, said nothing about McCarrick other than what I told you in person about his situation as an emeritus Bishop who was supposed to obey certain conditions and restrictions due to the rumors surrounding his past behavior.
Since I became Prefect of this Congregation on 30 June 2010, I never brought up the McCarrick case in an audience with Pope Benedict XVI or Pope Francis until these last days, after his removal from the College of Cardinals. The former Cardinal, who had retired in May 2006, had been strongly advised not to travel and not to appear in public, so as not to provoke additional rumors in his regard. It is false to present the measures taken in his regard as “sanctions” decreed by Pope Benedict XVI and revoked by Pope Francis. After re-examining the archives, I can ascertain that there are no corresponding documents signed by either Pope, neither is there a note of an audience with my predecessor, Cardinal Giovanni-Battista Re, giving Archbishop Emeritus McCarrick an obligatory mandate of silence and to retire to a private life, carrying canonical penalties. The reason being that at that time, unlike today, there was not sufficient proof of his alleged guilt.From everything that I have read shows McCarrick was a very skillful politician. When people confronted him with the accusations, he simply said that he had been investigated, and implied that he was not guilty because no public action had been taken against him. He used his many public activities to imply that all was well, knowing how unwilling people were to enforce any discipline because they didn't have strong evidence.
ADDENDUM
Austen Ivereigh treats
NB: Neither Ouellet nor yesterday’s Vatican statement are
excusing McCarrick ascent, & are preparing us to be shocked. This must mean
pope believes the time has come, finally, to put Card Sodano in the dock, and
ipso facto the final years of St JP2.
Is this a crack in the great wall of passing over difficult topics?
ReplyDeleteJack, can you give a link for Austen Ivereigh's piece?
ReplyDeleteIt was only a tweet, not an article.
DeleteThanks, Jack! Sometimes Twitter doesn't say enough, other times it says way too much.
DeleteOuellet confirms that McCarrick had been "strongly advised" not to travel and to stay out of the public spotlight. Strong advice is not the same as formal sanctions. My take on Ouellet's statement here is that it both confirms and contradicts Vigano - contradicts Vigano's claim that Benedict had levied 'private sanctions' (in the formal sense) against McCarrick, but confirms the gist of Vigano's larger narrative: that Benedict was aware and concerned enough to do something about it.
ReplyDeleteIn my view, Ouellet's statement more or less cements the picture that has emerged: of McCarrick as blithely ignoring the Holy Father's wishes, and of Benedict as lacking the will or the pull to banish McCarrick from the the public eye. There is a line of thought that says that the pope's wish should be a cardinal's command, certainly in a matter such as this.
Additional documentary evidence (not provided by the Holy See) also has surfaced that confirms that the Holy See knew of the accusations against McCarrick as far back as 2000, which puts us in the latter years of John Paul II's pontificate. Again, this confirms the basic contours of Vigano's claims.
"the picture that has emerged: of McCarrick as blithely ignoring the Holy Father's wishes, and of Benedict as lacking the will or the pull to banish McCarrick from the the public eye'
DeleteMy take on McCarrick is very different. Ouellet says "The prelate in question knew how to defend himself very skillfully regarding the doubts that were raised about him."
McCarrick understood his value to Rome in terms of money, and diplomatic help, and that they did not have the type of evidence they needed. It was mostly secondhand, and of the "he said, he said" variety. It was also about adults which raises the issue of consent and gets into the murky waters of adult abuse.
In America one prominent layperson who confronted McCarrick says that McCarrick handled it by saying that the accusations were investigated and obviously no public sanctions had been given.
The Vatican was ever prudent, weighing the cost of publicly disciplining him with poor evidence with the value of quietly trying to make him disappear. The tipping point was the credible case of child abuse which made the decision to go public obvious. As Ouellet says if additional information had been forthcoming in past years the decisions made then might have been different.
Even in the case of child abuse New York did not pursue the case but referred it to Rome because it was about a bishop. Rome said to process it just as any other priest. I am sure people in Rome knew that New York were not going to protect him.
"My take on McCarrick is very different. Ouellet says "The prelate in question knew how to defend himself very skillfully regarding the doubts that were raised about him."
DeleteMcCarrick understood his value to Rome in terms of money, and diplomatic help, and that they did not have the type of evidence they needed. It was mostly secondhand, and of the "he said, he said" variety. It was also about adults which raises the issue of consent and gets into the murky waters of adult abuse."
And yet Benedict did impose (or, if Ouellet is correct, semi-impose) sanctions of a sort on McCarrick. Either that was done without sufficient evidence, or there was sufficient evidence. I suspect the former; I haven't heard of Rome conducting any sort of an investigation into McCarrick. In fact, it's being reported that DiNardo and the American bishops requested one, and Francis demurred.
You may well be right about McCarrick's influence being based on his ability to raise funds and make donations. Here we see the ineffectuality of "private sanctions": Catholic donors to the Papal Fund should have been informed. For that matter, we don't know that McCarrick's fellow cardinals in the US knew about them.
Jim,
DeleteOne of McCarrick's claims to fame is that he discovered an historic Icon of Mary that had disappeared from Russia was actually at Fatima. He convinced the Fatima people to returned it to Rome so JP2 could return it to Russia hopefully in person. When that could not be done, McCarrick was the person who took it to Russia. McCarrick was a wheeler dealer in many ways.
Ouellet's letter at least suggests that conservatives, of which he is one, are not on the same page about the McCarrick scandal. It remains unclear, at least to me, who knew what when. Who, if anyone, did anything (back in 2000). And what, if anything, Francis knew, and what, if ever, he knew.
ReplyDeleteEven the Vatican is not transparent about its internal deliberations. That, as we see is a very destructive and dangerous situation. But who is there to remedy the prevailing practice of secrecy? Probably not even the pope!
On a related matter: I have thought Ross Douthat has been very prudent in his columns about Francis and these matters. I found yesterday's column not as fair as I think he has been before. Is the pope stonewalling as the headline says?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/opinion/pope-francis-catholic-church-sex-abuse.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion-columnists
I think the pope is stonewalling, at least temporarily. My own supposition is that he has/had big plans for this synod which currently is on-going, and the abuse scandals are threatening to/succeeding in sucking all the air out of what he hopes/d to get accomplished.
DeleteFrancis has promised to convene a special summit to deal with the scandals - but not until after the synod concludes. I think he's trying to bracket out the scandal from the synod.
I think Francis is oddly naive about the abuse scandal. He doesn't seem to have learned the lessons that the American bishops might possibly have, or at least should have, learned by now: that when the abuse scandals come knocking, you drop everything else, and address it head-on.
Jim,
DeleteI think Francis is very wise about the media. In fact the whole Vigano letter was pretty much fake news. He did not respond to it because is was fake news.
The notion that a new Pope should have been focused on McCarrick who was retired and had no position for seven years, and allegations that had been around for years but nothing done. That he should have abandoned the many concerns that he must have talked about with the other diplomats to deal with Vigano's information. It was not like Vigano was giving him new information from the United States. If the Congregation of Bishops had not been concerned why should he have been concerned?
All the promotions happened under JP2's watch!. What happened under Benedict was the lawsuit settlements, which I expect McCarrick explained away. What Benedict did do was accept McCarrick's resignation at mandatory retirement age almost immediately, plus that private admonition to keep a low profile.
All this has nothing to do with Francis concealing or ordering anything.
To me it is very obvious that many of the rich people of the world do not like Francis. That many rich Americans want to control the Church with a theological agenda that focuses upon abortion rather than social issues. They are even being very open now that that Vigano is their opportunity to intervene in the Church against Francis, and they plan to influence the next conclave.
Chaput, of course, wanted Francis to cancel the Synod topic and focus on the sexual abuse issue so of course the business interests could focus on how badly over the decades Rome has managed this, and make Francis look like he should have fixed it all. And, of course, all the problems were do to liberal bishops. Forget about Law, the Legionnaires etc.
Francis is not naïve.
"I think Francis is very wise about the media."
DeleteI think he generally has good instincts regarding the media, but they're not infallible. His staying-stoically-silent approach to the Vigano charges has been a fail - and not in character for him. He also slipped on a banana peel in Chile when he publicly ripped Karadima's victims/survivors. In both instances, I suspect he's been following someone's bad advice - just as he followed Vigano's bad advice in the Kim Davis affair. Untrustworthy aides are a danger for any leader.
I agree with you about JPII's watch (or lack thereof - I think John Paul was pretty debilitated by then). I suspect that, after this affair gets thoroughly vetted out, the roads will lead back to the usual-suspect officials who were de facto running the church back then. It seems likely enough that they were informed about McCarrick. Paul Moses in Commonweal had that figured out within a few days of Vigano's original bombshell, in an article which, in my opinion, deserves more public consideration than I've noticed it given so far.
I don't buy the notion that McCarrick was a washed-up has-been by the time Francis came along. In this as in some other things, Vigano's basic narrative holds water: McCarrick has been dispatched by Francis for foreign-relations purposes, and has been involved in raising large sums of money to bail out at least one troubled Vatican institution. Wittingly or not, Francis had indeed "rehabbed" McCarrick until the New York allegations came to the Vatican's attention.
"Ouellet's letter at least suggests that conservatives, of which he is one, are not on the same page about the McCarrick scandal."
DeleteI agree. Among church officials, those who are in more or less open revolt against Francis, like Vigano and Cardinal Burke, are small in number. (The number of typical Catholics may be somewhat larger, judging by the comments sections at the First Things website.) Conservatives tend to be pretty loyal to whoever sits in Peter's Chair, and many have not set that aside publicly, whatever their private qualms and concerns.
Ouellet deals with Francis all the time. Francis does not care for intellectuals much less ideologues as bishops; he wants pastors. Ouellet likely is getting many bishops approved from conservative backgrounds as long as they have strong pastoral rather than administrative or academic records.
ReplyDeleteAlso Ouellet job makes him one who wants to cooperate with many cardinals and bishops just to get things done.
Finally Vigano did the unthinkable. Ouellet all but says he excommunicated and defrocked himself. No Secretary of State, the head of the diplomate corps, is going to let Vigano get away with anything less than the most severe punishment available. As this all unwinds there are many people in the Vatican who are going to look bad, perhaps even two former Popes. For what purpose?
Already we have the threat of the conservative "red hat" organization which is going to profile cardinal electors for the next conclave. There has always been gossip over pasta in Rome, now it is going to be on the internet for all to see.
Paul Moses on Commonweal takes a look at Cardinal Ouellet's refutation of Vigano. Moses is (justly) critical both of Vigano and the Holy See during JP II's and Benedict's reigns. His overall assessment: "Viganò and others seeking to oust Pope Francis and a long list of prelates they dislike have tried to make the story sound as sinister as possible. But Viganò did not have the facts—at its heart, the Viganò testimony offered speculation and bitterness. It did draw attention to a problem that is real, though."
ReplyDeletehttps://www.commonwealmagazine.org/gaps-story?utm_source=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_campaign=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_medium=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_term=PANTHEON_STRIPPED