The sex abuse scandal has silted up again from the miasmal swamp of corruption and hypocrisy that is the Catholic Church. For the liberal media, and anti-Christian crusaders everywhere, the clergy’s abuse of children—as opposed, say, to the abuse of children by teachers in their progressive elementary school “sex-education” curricula–is the gift that keeps on giving. But the same progressives, who normally caper across the moral high ground with hircine sure-footedness, now find themselves stranded on a precipice of doubt as to how to respond to the recent 11-page letter of indictment by Archbishop Vigano.
Vigano’s meticulously documented and exhaustive record of the cover-up of Washington Archbishop, later Cardinal McCarrick’s “alternative lifestyle”—including his sleeping with young priests and seminarians at his private “beach-house”, which he apparently ran like a Club Med for Sodomite getaways—implicates 16 cardinals (Sodano, Bertone, Parolin, Levada, Ouellet, Baldissseri, Sandri, Filoni, Becciu, Lajola, Mamberti, Cocopalmerio, O’Brien, Martino, Wuerl, Ferrell), 3 archbishops (Montinari, Paglia, Myers), one monsignor (Antinocelli), one bishop (Bootkoski), and Pope Francis himself, not only in a conspiracy of silence and lies, but in their refusal to implement the strict canonical sanctions previously imposed on McCarrick by Pope Benedict, which Francis not only knew about, but chose to repeal. “The corruption”, writes Vigano, “has reached the top of the Church’s hierarchy.” “The face of the Bride of Christ”, he continues,
is terribly disfigured by so many abominable crimes [that] if we truly want to free the Church from the fetid swamp into which she has fallen, we must have the courage to tear down the culture of secrecy…, the conspiracy of silence with which bishops and priests have protected themselves at the expense of their faithful, a conspiracy of silence that in the eyes of the world risks making the Church look like a sect, a conspiracy of silence not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia.
As defamatory slurs against the Church, formulas such as “secret society”, “conspiracy of silence”, “mafia”, and “sect” are progressive calls to arms, which have made anti-religious zealots giddy with the promise of deliverance whenever uttered by such New Atheist prophets as Dan Brown or Richard Dawkins. When I first read Vigano’s letter, accordingly, I braced for a rash of gleefully creative headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post:
RENEGADE WHISTLE-BLOWER EXPOSES VATICAN CORRUPTION AT HIGHEST LEVELS
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CATHOLIC CHURCH ROTTING LIKE A FISH FROM THE HEAD DOWN
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CHRISTIANITY A “SECT”, WHICH EXPLOITS BRAINWASHED FAITHFUL, INSIDER CONFIRMS
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PAPACY THAT ENABLED NAZI FINAL SOLUTION, NOW CASTS VEIL OF SILENCE OVER CLERICAL CHILD-ABUSE.
Unless I’ve missed them, no such headlines have thusfar made it into print. Instead, the media response to Vigano’s indictment has been breezily dismissive. As The Atlantic admonished, “the letter is a power play by Vigano as much as a cri de coeur calling for a cleanup of the Church. And it may ultimately say less about the Church’s victims than it does about the man who wrote it.” The only conspiracy the indefatigable truth-hounds at the New York Times have been able to sniff out wasn’t the Vatican’s cover-up of clerical sex abuse, but the political coup being plotted by Vigano himself, “a staunch critic of the pope’s, [whose letter] seemed timed to do more than simply derail Francis’ uphill efforts to win back the Irish faithful…Its unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks amounted to an extraordinary public declaration of war against Francis’ papacy at perhaps its most vulnerable moment, intended to unseat a pope.”
Who’d have thought it? The real villain of the piece isn’t the mendacious, child-molesting, self-exculpating Church hierarchy (for once); it’s the Brutus under a miter scheming to overthrow it, by means of “unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks”. It seems that Archbishop Vigano has achieved the modern wonder of inducing liberals to rally to the defence of the Vatican Crime Family, and impugn its critics, just as Trump Derangement Syndrome has converted liberals, who once denounced anti-communists as paranoid witch-hunters, into rabid Russo-phobes. And they say that the age of miracles is long past.
The explanation for this ideological tergiversation is clear enough, of course: If you still show up at the office on casual Fridays wearing your Che Guevara tee-shirt, Francis is your man in Rome, sex abuse be damned. As pope, Francis has struggled mightily to differentiate socialism, climate change, and homosexual outreach from a fustian Christian orthodoxy. He is the anti-Benedict, who, for liberal Christians, has managed to exorcise the traditionalist nightmare of the retrograde Ratzinger-John Paul II-Benedict epoch, and assign it once and for all to the ash-heap of history. With Francis in the Vatican, the happy days of Seventies-era liberation theology would be here again; the Church would finally get back to its divinely ordained vocation of anathematizing capitalist greed, redistributing wealth from “North” to “South”, and propping up the embalmed effigies of Latin America’s few remaining Marxist caudillos (who, as the recent difficulties besetting Senors Chavez, Maduro, and Ortega suggest, need more propping up than ever).
But more deplorable than his opposition to Francis, Archbishop Vigano’s unforgivable sin is his identification (scrupulously documented, once again) of the root cause–liberalism is usually all about “root causes”–of the Church’s sex abuse scandal: i.e., the deeply entrenched “homosexual current”, as he calls it, in the Catholic hierarchy, which has not only raged beneath the gilded embroidery of episcopal vestments but is actively encouraged by the aforementioned clerics, especially Francis and his American protégés, McCarrick and Wuerl.
“As Cardinal”, writes Vigano, Benedict “had repeatedly denounced the corruption present in the Church, and in the first months of his pontificate had already taken a firm stand against the admission into seminary of young men with deep homosexual tendencies.” But rather like Trump’s “resistors” in the bureaucratic deep state, many in Benedict’s curia conspired to frustrate his moral reforms. In this context, Vigano names Cardinal Coccopalmerio and Archbishop Paglia (“very close to Pope Francis”) “who belong to the homosexual current in favor of subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality, a current already denounced in 1986 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger…in [his] Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons”, as well as Cardinals O’Brien and Martino, who “also belong to the same current”.
Unsurprisingly, given the recent revelations about McCarrick, it was in the U.S. (where Vigano served as Apostolic Nuncio from 2011 to 2016) that the hierarchy’s homosexual ecumenism have been most aggressive. As for political coups, Vigano recounts how, released by Francis from the constraints previously imposed upon him by Benedict, McCarrick, “in a team effort with Cardinal Maradiaga,…had become the kingmaker for appointments in the Curia and the United States”. McCarrick’s influence explains why Francis “replaced Cardinal Burke with Wuerl and immediately appointed Cupich, who was promptly made cardinal” and then Archbishop of Chicago. The appointments of both Cupich to Chicago and Tobin to Newark “were orchestrated by McCarrick, Maradiaga, and Wuerl, united by a wicked pact of abuses by the first, and at least of coverup of abuses by the other two”. As Vigano notes, the names of neither Cupich nor Tobin “were among those presented by the Nunciature for Chicago and Newark”.
“Regarding Cupich”, Vigano continues, “one cannot fail to note his ostentatious arrogance, and the insolence with which he denies the evidence that is now obvious to all: that 80% of the abuses found were committed against young adults by homosexuals who were in a relationship of authority over their victims”. Throughout his tenure as Archbishop of Chicago, Cupich was “blinded by his pro-gay ideology”, and as President of the Committee on Protection of Children and Young People of the U.S. Conference of Bishops, “he asserted that the main problem in the crisis of sexual abuse by clergy is not homosexuality, and that affirming this is only a way of diverting attention from the real problem which is clericalism”. (On the red herring of clerical celibacy as the cause of sexual abuse in the Church, see my previous post in these pages, The Alternative Lifestyle of Catholic Priests, Still). Hiding behind the same sophistical flimflam, Maradiaga “is so confident of the Pope’s protection that he can dismiss as ‘gossip’ the heartfelt appeals of dozens of his seminarians, who found the courage to write him after one of them tried to commit suicide over homosexual abuse in the seminary”.
As Vigano concludes:
The seriousness of homosexual behavior must be denounced. The homosexual networks present in the Church must be eradicated, as Janet Smith, Professor of Moral Theology at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, recently wrote. “The problem of clergy abuse”, she wrote, “cannot be resolved simply by the resignation of some bishops, and even less so by bureaucratic directives. The deeper problem lies in homosexual networks within the clergy which must be eradicated.” These homosexual networks, which are now widespread in many dioceses, seminaries, religious orders, etc., act under the concealment of secrecy and lies with the power of octopus tentacles, and strangle innocent victims and priestly vocations, and are strangling the entire Church.
This, of course, is blasphemous language, and it will inevitably call down upon the head of its speaker the anathema of the Church of Progress—where homosexuality, second only to abortion, is the highest sacrament–, even if he is inveighing against the rival and hated Church of Christ. What is rather more dispiriting is that, within the Catholic hierarchy itself, whenever the obvious causal nexus between clerical sexual abuse and homosexuality is drawn, that Gordian knot must be severed.