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The Church as a Human Institution So Rotted that Popular Culture No Longer Cares

Vigano Launches a Broadside at Pope Francis

On Saturday, August 25, 2018, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano released an 11-page letter to the media, making serious and specific allegations against the Vatican for its knowledge of the sexual impropriety and abuse of Cardinal McCarrick, and moreover, against Pope Francis himself, whom Vigano alleged had been personally informed of the situation, and yet knowingly chose to further enable Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. In releasing the letter, Vigano called on Pope Francis to resign from the papacy.

The letter came on the heels of the Pennsylvania grand jury report that was released on August 14, which detailed Catholic sexual abuse against minors perpetrated state-wide across many decades. Additionally, it was released in the midst of Pope Francis’s trip to Ireland, a main focus of which was Francis’s self-serving apologies on behalf of the rest of the Church for serious abuses that had been perpetrated during Ireland’s past era of strong-armed, pro-Catholic, pro-socialist governments. Vigano’s letter was a major embarrassment to the Pope, who was already been (rightfully) criticized by Irish children’s advocates who claimed that, beneath his empty rhetoric, he was attempting to sweep the problem under the rug and stonewall attempts at needed procedural reforms.

Pope Francis Offers His Typical Peronist, Stonewalling Response

The response of Pope Francis when first faced with questions about the news by reporters was extremely troubling: “I read the statement this morning, and I must tell you sincerely that, I must say this, to you and all those who are interested: Read the statement carefully and make your own judgment. I will not say a single word on this. I think this statement speaks for itself, and you have the sufficient journalistic capacity to draw conclusions. When some time passes and you have your conclusions, maybe I will speak. But I would like that your professional maturity carries out this task.”

As noted by Michael Brendan Dougherty at The National Review, “This can be read in a few ways. Either Pope Francis thinks that Viganò’s accusations are obviously non-credible and that he cannot dignify them with a response, or Pope Francis is caught off guard by these accusations and does not know what he can safely confirm or deny to the media without risking immediate humiliation.”

Even closer to the truth perhaps, as noted over at One Peter Five, is Pope Francis’s strong affiliation with Peronism: “Pope Francis evinced the storied autocratic temperament that has come to be widely known in many corners of the Vatican. When confronted with highly credible allegations of his own wrongdoing in relation to the homoerotic abuses of former Cardinal McCarrick, in an airborne ‘papal presser’ on Sunday, Pope Francis evinced the storied autocratic temperament that has come to be widely known in many corners of the Vatican. … Whatever the case about Perón, Pope Francis should be seen as a modified Latin American strongman – stifling dissent but allowing others to style him the embodiment of internationalist pride.”

The Controversy Over Allies of Francis Such as Cardinals Wuerl and Cupich

But in the passing days, the response from all corners (both pro-Francis and anti-Francis) have shown that this is a very serious scandal of historic proportions that should not easily go away. Caught up in the controversy are Cardinal Wuerl (Archbishop of Washington) and Cardinal Cupich (Archbishop of Chicago), both staunch allies of Pope Francis—Wuerl directly, Cupich only indirectly.

The charges against Wuerl are so serious that he is rumored to have fled the United States under orders from the Vatican, in order to avoid divulging details to prosecutors that could harm Pope Francis.

Cupich, on the other hand, is guilty of being a perfect emblem for the sort of oblivious tone deafness and active support of immorality that has come to characterize the so-called Progressive wing of the Catholic Church. As John O’Sullivan writes in The National Review: “Archbishop Blaise Cupich of Chicago sounded like a SNL parody of a secular humanitarian politician when he said: ‘The pope has a bigger agenda. He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church. We’re not going to go down a rabbit hole on this.’ ”

Ross Douthat Captures the Essence of the Situation

With the wars over the family being fought at the synods of 2014 and 2015, Ross Douthat established himself as the leading intellectual in the world in terms of understanding and defending the Catholic faith against the reality of what Pope Francis was attempting to do to it (i.e., to change it, and thereby—whether intentionally or not—to destroy it). With his column from Tuesday, August 28, Douthat got straight to the heart of the matter, and described how rotted the partisan, institutional nature of the Church had become. This is not to devolve into a simplistic anti-partisan narrative (“both sides are wrong!”) about what is occurring, but rather, only to assert that the political culture in the Catholic Church has become so toxic, that it has become impossible to embark on any unified project of improvement or change. The conservative supporters of Pope John Paul II (as in the case of Father Marcel Maciel) were acting just as wickedly as the liberal supporters of Pope Francis are today.

This may go a long way to explaining (but in no way justifying) the sad resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013, as realized the depth of sexual immorality and the mafia-type behavior from the gangs of political alliances within the Vatican walls, and (wrongly) felt powerless to change it. The liberal defenders of Pope Francis today want to make the Vigano letter a story about a conservative outlier seeking to settle political scores and grudges harbored for decades, and truth be told, there is likely a good bit of truth to that narrative. However, it obscures the fact that the liberal promotion of sexual liberation advocated by the liberal gangs of bishops and cardinal has, in a very real sense, led the Church to the point where it is today—sexually abberant and incapable of institutional reform, due to entrenched systems of political patronage.

As Taylor Marshall explained in his August 28 podcast, all of these things are very much linked to each other—i.e., the Benedict resignation, the conservative-vs-liberal political battles within the Catholic hierarchy, and the current Francis-McCarrick scandal.

But it’s probably best to let Douthat have the last work. As he writes in the concluding paragraphs of his August 28 column:

Now it’s why certain organs and apostles of liberal Catholicism are running interference for McCarrick’s protectors — because Francis is their pope, the liberalizer they yearned for all through the John Paul and Benedict years, and all’s fair in the Catholic civil war.

But the inevitable, even providential irony is that this sort of team thinking never leads to theological victory, but only to exposure, shame, disaster. Indeed, the lesson of these bitter decades is that any faction hoping to lead Roman Catholicism out of crisis should begin with purges within its own ranks, with intolerance for any hint of corruption.

Francis, alas for everyone, did the opposite. Elected by cardinals eager for a cleanup at the Vatican, he wanted to be a theological change agent instead — which led him to tolerate the corrupt Roman old guard (whose names fill Viganò’s letter) and to rehabilitate liberal figures like Danneels, McCarrick and Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga of Honduras (a dubious figure with a predator among his underlings and a scandal at his seminary) who deserved the sidelines if not a penitent’s cell.

Now those allies may be the ruin of his pontificate. But this doesn’t mean that the pope should resign — not even if Viganò is fully vindicated. One papal resignation per millennium is more than enough. That cop-out should not be easily available to pontiffs confronted with scandals, including scandals of their own making, any more than it should be available to fathers.

Instead the faithful should press Francis to fulfill the paternal obligations at which he has failed to date, to purge the corruption he has tolerated and to supply Catholicism with what it has lacked these many years: a leader willing to be zealous and uncompromising against what Benedict called the “filth” in the church, no matter how many heads must roll on his own side of the Catholic civil war.