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Monday, September 10, 2018

The Pope and McCarrick

UPDATE: Vatican promises 'necessary clarifications' to Pope Francis cover-up claims ... * In a statement, Francis' nine cardinal advisers expressed their "full solidarity" with the pope over the scandal, which has thrown his papacy into crisis. * ... Yeah, that's a comfort - one of those nine cardinals, George Pell, is himself presently about to stand trial in Australia for sex abuse.

*

I saw a 2014 Religious News Service article today by David Gibson - Globe-trotting Cardinal Theodore McCarrick is almost 84, and working harder than ever.

It makes clear that Pope Francis knew Cardinal McCarrick, recently demoted for sex abuse, quite well even before he became pope. Here's a bit of the article, which begins with McCarrick recovering from a heart attack in 2013 ...

McCarrick would eventually get a pacemaker — and the cardinal was soon back at his guest room in the U.S. seminary in Rome when the phone rang. It was Francis. The two men had known each other for years, back when the Argentine pope was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires. McCarrick assured Francis that he was doing fine.“I guess the Lord isn’t done with me yet,” he told the pope.

“Or the devil doesn’t have your accommodations ready!” Francis shot back with a laugh.

[...]

McCarrick is one of a number of senior churchmen who were more or less put out to pasture during the eight-year pontificate of Benedict XVI. But now Francis is pope, and prelates like Cardinal Walter Kasper (another old friend of McCarrick’s) and McCarrick himself are back in the mix, and busier than ever .....

He retired in 2006 and was sort of spinning his wheels under Benedict. Then Francis was elected, and everything changed.

“Pope Benedict is a wonderful man, and was a good friend of mine before he became pope,” McCarrick said. “But he was anxious to bring the church back to where he thought it should be, and I guess I wasn’t one of those who he thought would help him on that. I would have obviously done what he asked.” ....


It's creepy to read this article from the past which praises a man we have come to know as a serial sex abuse.

I bring the RNS article up because of the letter by ex-Vatican nuncio Vigano accusing Pope Francis of covering up McCarrick's sexual abuse. One of the assertions in the letter was that Francis had not just ignored the sexual abuse but had rehabilitated McCarrick's career after B16 had censored him. This article would seem to corroborate that claim.

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