DID  POPE FRANCIS IGNORE PRIEST’S SEXUAL ABUSES?                                                         

Admittedly, it is a terrible accusation to say that Pope Francis did ignore the abuses against Catholic children by their priests and the cover-ups by their bishops. However, he did.

When Pope Francis was elected by the cardinals to be their next pope, millions of Catholics were pleased. However, hundreds of thousands of devoted Catholics were not. As far as they were concerned, he abandoned them in their hour of need. I am speaking of the victims of sexual abuse by his priests and their families.  Worse yet, many of them knew that their pope had even ignored the cover ups of those crimes by their bishops.

The Pope drew criticism in 2013 for appearing on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica with retired Belgian cardinal  Godfried Danneels  in the Pope's initial presentation, as well as appointments he received from the pope.  Danneels had previously recommended silence on sex-crimes committed by priests. In 2014 his rehabilitation of Fr. Mauro Inzoli, who was defrocked in 2012 for sexually abusing minors, sparked controversy. In 2015, he was criticized for supporting Chilean bishop Juan Barros, who was accused over covering up sex-crimes against minors.^[  In February 2017, further criticism from clergy sex abuse survivors erupted when it was revealed that the Pope had quietly made the Church-recommended sentence for clergy convicted of sex abuse a lifetime of prayer rather than a recommendation to serve time in jail.

Pope Francis received a sex victim’s eight-page letter in 2015 that graphically detailed how a priest sexually abused him and how other Chilean clergy ignored it thereby contradicting the pope’s recent insistence that no victims had come forward to denounce the cover-up, according letter’s author and members of Francis’ own sex-abuse commission who  told the Associated Press. 

On August 25, 2018, days after the Pope had issued an apology for abuses by clergy in the United States  and before his apology in Ireland, former papal nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò released an 11-page letter explaining that Pope Benedict XVI had secretly forbidden Theodore Edgar McCarrick (later forced to resign in 2018 following accusations of sexual abuse against him that the Vatican deemed credible) from leaving the seminary grounds where he was residing and from celebrating Mass in public based on accusations of sexual abuse.

Viganò claimed that Pope Francis decided to remove these restrictions and to make McCarrick an advisor. McCarrick allegedly "orchestrated" the appointments of archbishops Blase Cupich and Joseph W. Tobin. Viganò said that Pope Francis "knew from at least June 23, 2013 that McCarrick was a serial predator. He knew that he was a corrupt man, he covered for him to the bitter end." He called on Francis and all others who covered up McCarrick's conduct to resign.^] The Pope acknowledged that he had read the McCarrick letter but said that he did not plan to comment on it publicly. The Catholic News Agency reported that Monsignor Jean-François Lantheaume, the former first counsellor at the apostolic nunciature in Washington D.C., confirmed that Viganò told "the truth" but declined to offer additional comment.

The pope apologized at length for child sex abuses on children  committed  by priests. Despite this, there were widespread calls for stronger action against abusers rather than just words. For example the Australian, Melbourne's  SevenNews  television  broadcasts combined Pope Francis' declaration of shame at the "Catholic Church's failure to address decades of 'repugnant' sexual abuse by paedophilic priests", with films of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar's speech and shots of protests. Headlines in The Guardian included efforts  to move the Catholic church from the centre of society, The headlines  said that Pope Francis had  failed to act  on American abuse claims, according the  former Vatican envoy Vardakar who mentioned that the grand jury report over abuse in Pennsylvania, referred to “brutal crimes perpetrated by 300 priests against a thousand children within the Catholic church, and then hid the crimes from the public  to protect the Catholic Church at the expense of innocent victims”. Vardakar added, there was “much to be done to bring about justice and truth and healing for victims and survivors.”

Pope Francis granted diplomatic immunity to a Vatican diplomat suspected of child pornography offenses in the United States. The Vatican City, led by its head of state Pope Francis, refused an American request to waive Monsignor Carlo Alberto Capella's diplomatic immunity, closing off the possibility of Capella's being prosecuted in the U.S. on child pornography charges. Actually, Pope Francis didn’t have to grant diplomatic immunity to Capella, since he already possessed that status by default as an accredited Vatican diplomat. In June 2018, a court in the Vatican City convicted and sentenced Monsignor Carlo Alberto Capella. He had been  caught with a trove of indecent images and videos of children being sexually abused that investigators claim he was trading internationally with other pedophiles.

The Vatican City State Tribunal, composed of three judges, convicted Capella the following day, and Judge Giuseppe Dalla Torre sentenced him to five years in prison, the maximum sentence available under a child pornography law introduced in the Vatican City in 2013.  Capella did not contest the charges against him, and he blamed his actions on a “personal crisis,” dismissing them as “merely a bump in the road” and vowing to forge ahead in his ministry.

A trip to Chile in January 2018 was seen as a resounding failure after he defended a bishop accused of covering up the crimes of a paedophile priest. Francis, who like his predecessor Benedict XVI, promised a "zero tolerance" approach to sexual abuse, sparked uproar when he said: "The day they bring me proof against Bishop Juan Barros, then I will speak." However,  he later apologised to the victims and sent a Vatican top expert on sex abuse to hear the witnesses in the case.

After the investigation was completed, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of that controversial figure at the center of Chile's child sex abuse scandal along with two other bishops, according to the Vatican. Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno was accused of covering up the acts of a notorious abuser, and the pope enraged thousands of Catholics in Chile when he appointed Barros as bishop in 2015 since they already knew he had covered up the acts of the sexual abuser. The pope had previously made attempts to defend the bishop.   

For centuries, the words "Vatican" and "intrigue" have gone hand in hand. But the Holy See's centuries-old code of secrecy ensured that scandals and conspiracies usually remained hidden behind the tall and sturdy Renaissance walls of the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church, unbeknownst to the faithful masses around the world.

Now, in the era of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, mudslinging between rival church factions is being waged out in the open.

"It's as if the Borgias and the Medicis had Twitter accounts," Christopher Bellitto, a professor of church history at Kean University in New Jersey, told the National Catholic Reporter.

The power struggle has been simmering ever since the Argentine-born Jorge Maria Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013. He signaled a break with his two predecessors by promoting a message of mercy over strict dogma, of inclusion over punishment.

The anger of a traditionalist faction critical of the pope's more welcoming church broke out into the open for the whole world to see  with the publication by conservative Catholic media outlets of a bombshell letter by a former Vatican diplomat. The letter was released just as the pope was on a highly charged visit to Ireland which turned out to be ground zero in the clerical sex abuse crisis.

The vitriolic 11-page letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican's former ambassador to the United States, is filled with innuendo. Mixing factual and ideological claims, it accuses Francis of knowing and ignoring allegations of sexual misconduct by the recently disgraced Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., who resigned as cardinal in 2018.  In the letter, Viganò called on the pope to step down for complicity in covering up crimes committed by priests and the cover ups by their bishops.

In the unprecedented attack 9n Pope Francis, Viganò mde numerous unsubstantiated claims. That doesn’t mean that the crimes weren’t committed.  He said that in 2013, he personally informed the new pope that McCarrick had been widely accused of inviting seminarians into his bed and that Francis' predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had punished McCarrick by forbidding him to celebrate Mass in public, give lectures and travel. Benedict, he says, ordered McCarrick to dedicate himself to a life of prayer and penance. Viganò claims that Francis overruled those sanctions and virtually rehabilitated McCarrick so he could continue his abuses as he did earlier. 

The wrinkles in Viganò's claim are that there is no public knowledge that Benedict ever issued any kind of sanctions against McCarrick and that it contradicts the historical record. McCarrick was often seen celebrating Mass, visiting Rome and attending events with Benedict. It is possible that the former pope did impart those orders secretly and for some reason was unable or unwilling to enforce them.

The known fact is that when credible allegations recently surfaced that McCarrick had abused a minor, it was Pope Francis who elicited his resignation as cardinal — an extremely rare occurrence in the Catholic Church.

Viganò's letter, titled "Testimony," also contains accusations of cover-ups by about a dozen cardinals who served under Pope Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II when he was pope — many of whom Viganò has clashed with in the past. It makes no mention of the fact that Viganò himself once tried to quash a probe into a Minneapolis archbishop being investigated for misconduct with seminarians. That Vatican officials have covered up clerical sex abuse is an open secret.

It is public knowledge that during John Paul II's papacy, one of the cardinals named in Viganò's letter — former Vatican Secretary of State (equivalent to Prime Minister) Angelo Sodano the long protected Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, a Mexican priest who founded the Legion of Christ. Maciel, who died in 2008, turned out to be a serial predator of minors and was removed from active ministry by Pope Benedict.

Rwcently, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro  who had headed the biggest-ever U.S. investigation into clerical sex abuse, uncovering seven decades of abuse of more than 1,000 victims by some 300 priests. He said his office had evidence the Vatican knew about cover-ups. But he could not verify whether Pope Francis had direct knowledge of the crimes. However,  I find it difficult to assume that he didn’t know of some of those  sexual abuses being committed by the priests.

The Viganò letter rarely mentions children — the prime victims of clerical sex abuse. Rather, it reads like an ideological screed, a homophobic manifesto. The retired archbishop belongs to a traditionalist church faction, critical of what it decries as Francis' gay-friendly agenda. Those traditionalists blame clerical sex abuse on the presence of homosexuals in the church and believe Francis is too lenient with gays.

Viganò calls for the eradication inside the church of what he calls "homosexual networks which is an 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."

Most secular experts reject the identification of homosexuality with pedophilia as retrograde and encouraging anti-gay bigotry. There is a fallacy in that conclusion. Men who are not homosexual also sexually abuse both boys and girls.

Francis and his supporters in the church mostly blame clericalism that is  a sense of superiority, exclusion and entitlement among the clergy that distances them from the laity by creating a culture where the crimes of pedophilia are committed.

On the flight back to Rome from Ireland, reporters asked Pope Francis two key questions — whether it was true that Viganò had told him about McCarrick and whether Benedict had issued sanctions on McCarrick.

Francis answered neither question, dismissed the letter and told reporters to read it and judge for themselves. That was a stupid response.

One of the pope's closest aides, the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, who is the  editor of the Vatican-approved Civiltà Cattolica, tweeted that Pope Francis has never publicly "defended himself against the accusations  because he *knows* that sooner or later the truth will surface." Nevertheless, those crucial questions are still hanging, unanswered, which has emboldened the pope's critics.

Referring to Viganò's allegations, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, told his diocese in a letter, "I will lend my voice in whatever way necessary to call for this investigation and urge that its findings demand accountability of all found to be culpable at the highest level of the church." And, commenting on the Viganò letter, the ultraconservative Rome-based Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American, told the conservative Catholic website LifeSiteNews, "After the truth of each declaration has been established, then the appropriate sanctions must be applied both for the healing of the horrible wounds inflicted upon the Church and her members, and for the reparation of the grave scandal caused."

In 2016, Burke and three other cardinals wrote a public letter known as the dubia("doubts" in Latin), in which they accused Francis of sowing confusion on moral issues.

Viganò himself has a reputation as a disgruntled prelate with an ax to grind. In 2012, detailed letters he wrote to Benedict accusing other prelates of financial corruption were leaked to the Italian media and led to the Vatileaks scandal that is said to have persuaded Benedict to step down as pope.

While Viganò presented himself as a whistleblower, many inside the Vatican began to question his credibility. As Vatican ambassador to the United States from 2011 to 2016, Viganò took active part in the "culture wars." That proved his undoing.

During Francis' visit to the United States  in 2015, the ambassador orchestrated a meeting between the pope and Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, who had been jailed for five days for refusing to issue same-sex-marriage licenses because of her religious beliefs. News of the meeting —which contrasted with Francis' message of inclusion that was made public days later and reportedly infuriated the pope, who summoned Viganò back to Rome.

In the days since Viganò's latest bombshell, more details have emerged as to how his letter came about. Marco Tosatti, a conservative Italian journalist who has covered the Vatican for many years, told the Associated Press he helped Viganò write the letter and that he persuaded the former archbishop to make it public after the August 15^th release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report.

Tosatti  said that  Viganò has gone into hiding to avoid the media onslaught and told the New York Times Viganò was "worried for his own security."

Another person who appears to have encouraged Viganò to speak out is Timothy Busch, a conservative American Catholic on the board of governors of the media network that owns the National Catholic Register, one of the outlets that first published Viganò's letter.

Busch told the New York Times, "Archbishop Viganò has done us a great service" and said the National Catholic Register's leaders "had personally assured him" that Benedict had confirmed Viganò's account, the paper reported. But the retired pope's secretary, Archbishop Georg Ganswein, told a German newspaper that reports that Benedict had confirmed Viganò's letter "lack any foundation."

Later, quoting close aides of Francis, the Italian news agency ANSA reported that the pope is "embittered" by the Viganò letter but "is not contemplating a resignation."

Even before the Viganò letter was released, Pedophilia by Catholic priests in many countries around the world had become the biggest crisis of Francis' papacy, with survivors of abuse demanding the pope undertake much more concrete steps to hold accountable those bishops who ignored or willfully covered up sex predator priests. Conservatives, meanwhile, based their attacks on the pope on doctrinal issues.

Now, after the letter's release, Francis' opponents have raised the stakes, trying to de-legitimize him by accusing the pope directly of covering up sexual abuse. The battle lines have been drawn — the weapon is the issue of clerical sex abuse; the target is the papacy of Francis. The next battleground is likely to be the Youth Synod, a major meeting of Catholic bishops from all over the world, to be held in Rome in October 2018.

When Francis set up the commission in December 2014 to look into how to protect minors and vulnerable adults in the Church, Collins was one of two abuse survivors to sit on the panel.

Collins, who resigned last year from the now revived anti-pedophilia commission said, “The Church tends to make the same mistake in every country where survivors start to come forward.  They are treated in the same way. Children 'continue to be abused and raped'.”

Collins walked out of the Commission in March 2017, denouncing the "shameful" lack of cooperation within the Vatican and complaining that a tribunal announced in 2015 to deal with pedophile priests had never actually been set up.         

Catherine Bonnet, a French child psychiatrist who also sat on the commission, complained that "in three years we only had six plenary meetings in Rome".

"We did have regular e-mail exchanges, but it's hard to debate in that way," she told AFP in an interview, "We have made proposals on important points, but, to my knowledge, Pope Francis has not given answers, which is really worrying. The problem is that the pope is extremely busy with many other issues. But the issue of protecting today's children is urgent. Children continue to be abused and raped within the Church."

The decision, for example, the intention to hold the funeral of disgraced US Cardinal Bernard Law in the St. Peter's basilica in may have been within liturgical tradition, but it caused offence to survivors of sexual abuse in the United States.

Law, who was a former Boston archbishop, became one of the main faces of the sex abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church after gw admitted that he failed to protect children from predator priests, despite evidence they had been molesting youngsters.

Another case that cast a shadow over Francis' papacy is the Vatican's finance chief Cardinal George Pell, who was facing committal proceedings in Australia to determine whether he should stand trial on multiple historical sexual offence charges. As the Vatican's number three official,  the 76-year-old Pell is the highest ranking Catholic official to face such charges.

The pope did however oversee a change in Church law in 2016 allowing bishops to be dismissed in cases of "negligence" when reporting incidents of paedophilia. However prior to that decision, he turned a blind eye to the bishop’s wrongdoings.

The Church has a long and dark history of covering up pedophilia cases and protecting priests caught raping children. Earlier in May 2017, the Vatican came under fire for forgiving a priest who admitted to raping 30 young children resulting in him infecting them with the HIV virus.      

The church’s inaction on pedophilia may signal to some critics as well as survivors of pedophile priest abuses, that the emotional development of its children is of little concern to the church, who some have said are protecting pedophiles instead of rooting them out from among their ranks.

As the Free Thought Project previously reported, this scandal has long affected the Catholic church. In 2014, Pope Francis admitted that “about two percent” or 1 in 50 Roman Catholic priests are pedophiles.

 The number of Catholic priests in the United States has had  a drastic decline since 1965, from nearly 60,000 to 37,500 in 2015.  As of May 30, 2017, information published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) indicated that the conference had counted 6,721 clerics who were "credibly" accused of sexually abusing minors in the period 1950 through June 30, 2016. Out of the 116,690 priests who have worked in those years, the 6,721 priests who were accused of abusing children totaled 5.8% of the total priests.

Considering that the most up to date census I could find was taken in 2005, it lists 406,411 Catholic priests throughout the world. How many of them sexually abused the children in their parish? If 58 percent of them did, the number of child victims is terrifying.

The Church's Code of Canon Law 1395:2 says, "A cleric who has offended in other ways against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue, if the crime was committed by force, or by threats, or in public, or with a minor under the age of sixteen years, is to be punished with just penalties, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state if the case so warrants."

Many of the pedophile priests were simply moved to another parish where they continued to molest the children in their care. One of them was sent to Canada where he then molested children in his care.

With such ecclesiastical leniency, some priest can, and do, abuse large numbers of choir boys and altar boys. It should always be pointed out that the great majority of Catholic priests are decent men, but the Church allows their good name to be tarnished as long as it fails to cooperate with the police once it has grounds to suspect a crime has been committed.

Pole Francis had promised solutions to repair the reputation of the church but he added to its bad reputation by essentially condoning the horrid practice. It appeared that his solution was to sweep the stories of sexual abuse by his priests  under the rug.

One of the child molesting priests who was given clemency by the Pope was later arrested.  The Rev. Mauro Inzoli was later facing a second church trial after new evidence of more instances of sexual abuse emerged against him. In November 2017, an Italian criminal judge showed little mercy in convicting Inzoli of abusing five children, aged 12-16, and sentencing him to four years, nine months in prison. The judge said Inzoli had a number of other victims but their cases fell outside the statute of limitations.

It is no secret that the Vatican has been sweeping the issue of pedophilia under the rug for many years. In 2014, the UN issued a scathing report, blasting the Vatican for protecting its pedophiles.

The U.N. committee’s main human rights investigator, Sara Oviedo, led the most intense grilling the Holy See has received on this issue, according to a report by The Associated Press. “Given the “zero tolerance” policy of the Vatican, Orviedo asked, “why were there “efforts to cover up and obscure these types of cases?”

Another committee member, psychologist Maria Rita Parsi, added: “If these events continue to be hidden and covered up, to what extent will children be affected?”

Many canon lawyers and church authorities argue that defrocking pedophiles can put society at greater risk because the church no longer exerts any control over them. They argue that keeping the men in restricted ministry, away from children, at least enables superiors to exert some degree of supervision.

Pope Francis scrapped the commission’s proposed tribunal for bishops who botch abuse cases following legal objections from the congregation. The commission’s other major initiative that is a guideline template to help dioceses develop policies to fight abuse and safeguard children is gathering dust. The Vatican never sent the template to bishops’ conferences, as the commission had sought, or even linked it to its main abuse-resource website.

This has been the most horrible scandal that the Church has had to face since Luther bought in the reformation.

Since when the Church had previously claimed that it did not have a problem with paedophile priests, we can only surmise why it allowed this to continue by protecting the priests who abused the children in their parishes. Further, the reputation of the Church was at stake.  

In case after case, priests would give their superiors an assurance that they were innocent of the charges, these assurances would be accepted and the priest would be transferred to a distant parish where he was unknown and could reoffend.

The public was assured that there was no problem, and if there was a problem, it was limited to just one or two bad apples who had been punished most severely by the Church—which they were not. The punishments open to the Church are surprisingly lenient, as documented in the Church's Code of Canon Law 1395:2: " A

A priest who has offended in other ways against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue and if the crime was committed by force , or by threats , or in public , or with a minor under the age of sixteen years, is to be punished with just penalties, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state if the case so warrants ."

In other words, the ecclesiastical punishment for a most heinous criminal offence is equivalent to a slap on the wrist with a wet lettuce leaf. With such ineffective punishment sanctioned, the Church's own Canon Law allow priests to abuse children with impunity unless the perpetrator was reported to the police and the Church cooperated fully with the police and civil authorities in their investigations.

The Code does not oblige the Church hierarchy to notify the police or civil authorities when they believe a criminal offence has been committed by one of their own, and it seems the general practice is not to do so.

If the possibility of criminal prosecution is the only sanction that could give a paedophile priest reason to stop what he is doing to the children, ,this failure of many in the Church hierarchy to cooperate with the police and other civil authorities almost provides a licence for their priests  to offend. This is a situation  where silence is protection of the Church. In other cases, the alleged perpetrator can be transferred to a parish in another country, or even to the Vatican.

 One of the most obvious reasons for providing a pedophile priest with protection is to avoid publicity and protect the name of the Catholic Church, although this is a short-sighted view. Another likely reason is misplaced loyalty to the offender. The Catholic Church’s problem is that it isis a difficult and multi-faceted problem.

Presumably, the Catholic Church officially (per the rules issued by Pope John II and the Holy See did not tolerate priests who abused  children at all. Even the very suspicion of child abuse qas usually enough to have a priest suspended, and all accusations, and investigations up to that point were be turned over to the civil authorities immediately.

This was the official position of the Church, and has been since Pope John Paul II, when he was guiding the Vatican. All of these regulations and details referring thereto, had also been further refined, and more vehemently enforced by the Pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI.

That being said, there remain two problems,  First of all, one must understand that the Catholic Church is a huge organization, if you look at it from a secular standpoint. It covers the entire world, and is made up of individual dioceses, each headed by a Bishop as each Bishop is a successor of the Apostles, in an unbroken chain for the past two thousand years. A Bishop, in his own diocese, has absolute authority. Other Bishops, for instance in the same province, even the Archbishop of his province, has no authority whatsoever in his diocese. Every single priest in his diocese has made a life-long solemn vow of obedience to his ordaining Bishop, and his successors. No other Bishop, including the Holy Father in Rome, may gainsay a Bishop, or direct him, his diocese, or his priests.

The second problem is entirely outside the Church's control. At this point in time, it is fairly safe to say that there was a large  amount of abuse going on by priests All that being said, the safest answer for the Church is to say that that the Catholic Church does not protect priests who abuse children. Of course, that was a lie.  

Since it has come to light that many Bishops, in the past, had gone to great lengths to protect the Church's (or their own!) reputation by moving priests, the Holy See has gone to great lengths to assure that this will not happen again. Can they guarantee all of this? Of course not. The

. If a new case of abuse is still happening, it is an absolute tragedy, a sin, and a blot on the Church. Are there still Bishops out there who might still be moving priests? Not any more however, there may be and it would seem unlikely in the atmosphere in the Church today.

But out of the thousands and thousands of priests world-wide, and the thousands of Bishops world-wide, who are, in the final analysis, still human beings, there is bound to be some abuse still to be uncovered.

Child molestation is everywhere. We can never put an end to it. But why did so many Catholic priests do it?  There is an easy explanation. They were men who were denied by the Catholic Church the right to marry a woman and have sex with her.

Sex is a powerful drive in human beings that can be difficult to control. I am convinced that every priest, bishop, archbishop, cardinal and the pope can be sexually aroused so I understand the problem they have in avoiding having sex with a member of the opposite sex.

The Church realizes this. There is an exception of course.  If a man was married before he entered the priesthood, he will continue to be married even while he is a priest.

A great any young men who had visions of being a Catholic priest, decided not to be a priest for this reason. This is why there is a vast shortage of young men in the seminaries. This is also why many Catholic churches are no longer in use anymore. There are simply not enough priests available anymore.

Just because a man is married and has sex with his wife does not mean that he could not be a good priest. Many Anglican priests are married and they are just as good as Catholic priests are.

Eventually, the Catholic Church as to come to terms with this issue because if they choose to ignore it, some priests will still sexually abuse the children in their care and there will continue to be a shortage of young men wishing to be Catholic priests.  If that happens, it is concievable that in the far future the Vatican will encourage women to be priests in their church. Don’t laugh. There is a woman who is an archbishop in the Anglican Church of Canada and that church is the closest Church to the Catholic Church.