Ex-Vatican official urges Pope Francis to resign over abuse case

A FORMER top-ranking Vatican official has come forward with shocking claims about Pope Francis, urging the religious leader to step down.

A FORMER top-ranking Vatican official has come forward with shocking allegations about Pope Francis, accusing him of being complicit in covering up horrific abuses by the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, and urged Francis to step down.

In a letter, the retired ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, accused senior Vatican officials of knowing as early as 2000 that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians into his bed but was made a cardinal regardless.

Pope Francis was recently in Dublin to attend the 2018 World Meeting of Families. Picture: AFP

The letter, an extraordinary allegation from the one-time Holy See diplomat, also accuses Pope Francis of knowing about McCarrick’s behaviour in 2013 but rehabilitating him — a claim of cover-up against the pontiff himself.

The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published the letter attributed to Vigano on Sunday as the pope wrapped up a two-day visit to Ireland dominated by the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano (L) accused senior Vatican officials of knowing as early as 2000 that Theodore McCarrick regularly invited seminarians into his bed. Picture: AFP

Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hard-line anti-gay views are well known, urged the reformist pope to resign over the issue and what he called the “conspiracy of silence” about McCarrick. He and the pope have long been on opposite ideological sides, with the pope more a pastor and Vigano more a cultural warrior.

The Vatican did not immediately comment on the letter or confirm its authenticity.

In it, Vigano accused the former Vatican secretaries of state under the previous two popes of ignoring detailed denunciations against McCarrick for years.

He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer.

Pope Francis (L) and Pope emeritus Benedict XVI during a meeting in 2016. Picture: AFP

Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation as cardinal last month, after a US church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

Since then, another man has come forward to say McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary.

The accusations have created a crisis of confidence in the US hierarchy, because it was apparently an open secret that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed.

Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report — which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1000 children over 70 years in six dioceses — the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

Disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Picture: AP

Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions. His letter identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair, an unthinkable expose for a Vatican diplomat to make.

He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.

The Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2011 to 2016, Vigano said his two immediate predecessors “did not fail” to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000.

He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on June 23, 2013, at the Vatican’s Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.

Vigano wrote that he told Francis: “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.” Soon thereafter, Vigano wrote, he was surprised to find that McCarrick had started travelling on missions on behalf of the church, including to China. McCarrick was also one of the Vatican’s intermediaries in the U.S.-Cuba talks in 2014.

Vigano’s claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that McCarrick enjoyed a fairly public retirement. Vigano provides no evidence that such sanctions were imposed by Benedict in any official capacity, saying only that he was told they were.

The letter states that Pope Francis is complicit. Picture: AP

The letter also contains a lengthy diatribe about homosexuals and liberals in the Catholic Church. It often reads like an ideological manifesto, naming all of Francis’ known supporters in the U.S. hierarchy as being complicit in a cover-up of McCarrick’s misdeeds.

“Now that the corruption has reached the very top of the church’s hierarchy, my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths regarding the heartbreaking case of the archbishop emeritus of Washington,” Vigano wrote.

Vigano, however, also has had his own problems with allegations of cover-up, and he and Francis had a major dust-up during Francis’ 2015 visit to the U.S., which Vigano organised.

In that incident, a leading U.S. opponent of gay marriage, Kim Davis, was among those invited to meet with the pope at Vigano’s Washington residence. Francis was so enraged that Davis’ supporters had leaked word of the meeting that the Vatican subsequently insisted he only held one private audience while there: with one of his former students, a gay man and his partner.

Pope Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation as cardinal last month. Picture: Getty

Archbishop Carolo Vigano, former Vatican envoy to the US. Picture: Supplied

The cover-up accusation, which Vigano denied, concerned allegations that he tried to quash an investigation into the former archbishop of St. Paul- Minneapolis, Minnesota, John Nienstedt, who was accused of misconduct with adult seminarians.

In 2016, the National Catholic Reporter said Vigano allegedly ordered the investigation wrapped up and a piece of evidence destroyed. The report cited a 2014 memo from a diocesan official that was unsealed following the conclusion of a criminal investigation into the archdiocese.

No charges were filed. Nienstedt was forced to resign in 2015 over complaints about his handling of sex abuse cases.

Vigano’s name also made headlines during the 2012 “Vatileaks” scandal, when some of his letters were published. In them, he begged not to be transferred to the Vatican embassy in Washington from the administration of the Vatican City State.

He claimed he was being punished for having exposed corruption in the Vatican. The letters showed a clash with Benedict’s No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who is also a target of his McCarrick missive.