Posted on 11/10/2020 11:59:46 AM PST by FewsOrange
VATICAN CITY — A highly anticipated Vatican report found on Tuesday that Pope John Paul II had rejected explicit warnings about sexual misconduct by Theodore E. McCarrick, now a disgraced former cardinal, choosing to believe the American prelate’s denials and misleading accounts by bishops as he elevated him to the highest ranks of the church hierarchy. ...
Given Mr. McCarrick’s long career — as a priest in New York, archbishop of Newark and a Washington cardinal with a national and international profile — the 449-page report had the potential to engulf three separate papacies in scandal. Since the abuse carried out by Mr. McCarrick became public in 2017, conservative critics have accused Francis of covering up the American’s misconduct. ... “Pope John Paul II personally made the decision to appoint McCarrick,” the report says, despite receiving a letter in 1999 from Cardinal John O’Connor, then the archbishop of New York, that summed up allegations, some anonymous, that Mr. McCarrick had engaged in sexual conduct with another priest in 1987, that he had committed pedophilia and that he shared a bed with young adult men and seminarians.
John Paul II ordered an investigation to determine whether the allegations were true. Bishops found that Mr. McCarrick had shared a bed with young men but said they were not sure there had been sexual misconduct, according to the inquiry, which now considers the information provided by those bishops to have been misleading...
When credible allegations of sexual abuse by Mr. McCarrick of a minor emerged that year, Francis stripped Mr. McCarrick of his rank of cardinal and subsequently removed him from the priesthood in February 2019, after the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith found him guilty of solicitation during confession and of abuse. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
By all accounts, John Paul II was a good man. No, he was a great man. Along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II brought down the Iron Curtain. Those three freed millions of people.
John Paul II was also not stupid. So to this day I am surprised - and disappointed - that he did not crush the homosexual mafia within the Church. John Paul II certainly had the power and prestige to crush them. But he didn’t.
It pains me to say this. But there is really no excuse for his inaction.
Good grief, blame a saint!
Remember this saintly Pope I do believe, after the attempt on his life,his health began to decline from there.
So maybe JP2 isn’t a Catholic saint after all?
Or infallible?
.... All the while realizing those are invalid Scriptural categories to begin with...
... They are categories that are not Scripturally valid.....
Better phrasing.
I read somewhere years ago -- wish I had saved it -- that when he was a young man under communist oppression in Poland, he observed accusations of homosexuality being used to discredit people politically. Perhaps he was in solidarity with their perceived innocence, or perhaps he was just naive; but his reluctance to crack down on it supposedly stemmed from those experiences.
Ping!
He was from Eastern Europe, and the Reds had used such accusations to attempt to undermine the Church. Definitely a weak spot, understandable to some extent given his background.
McCarrick should topple Spellman, and with him, the whole mess stinks back through the beginning of Pius XII, if not beyond.
Good to see this in breaking news, not religion. That is where the latest stuff on Pope Francis generally belongs.
Going by the pre-Paul VI norms, JPII would have been beatified.
Inflation is a bad thing.
“ Bishops found that Mr. McCarrick had shared a bed with young men but said they were not sure there had been sexual misconduct, according to the inquiry, which now considers the information provided by those bishops to have been misleading...”.
JPII relied on the bishops and they simply lied. Note that they are not named - some are the same ones Bergoglio has moved up the line and even made cardinal.
When BXVI attempted to remove McCarrick and make him withdraw to seclusion and no longer represent the Church in any public from, McCarrick and his cohort simply ignored him.
Bergoglio only did something when the embarrassment about his inaction and protection of McCarrick became too great. Meanwhile, McCarrick’s best buddies, Wilton Gregory, the bad Tobin (who actually lived with McCarrick and said they saw nothing at all) and a couple of others have been promoted up the line by Bergoglio as a reward for their lies.
> JPII relied on the bishops and they simply lied. <
Well, okay. But JPII certainly had his own sources of information - information apart from the bishops.
So with all due respect, I simply cannot accept ‘the bishops lied’ as an excuse.
As I noted earlier, I am a HUGE fan of JPII. I wish there was a good explanation - something that would free him from the accusation of doing nothing when he should have doing something.
It saddens me. But I have seen no such explanation. Others might differ. I understand and respect that.
What sources of information other than the bishops? That’s their job.
That said, JPII was too trusting. And JPII did ignore all of the things about Maciel, which he must have known about. Maciel was removed by BXVI in one of his first acts as Pope.
When BXVI removed McCarrick from public, McCarrick simply ignored him...and so did the bishops, including Wuerl, who knew perfectly well that McCarrick was out and about and appearing at fundraisers. I think when Benedict realized the extent of his powerlessness was when he decided to resign.
And Bergoglio “has no recollection” of being warned by Vigano that McCarrick was still active? Gimme a break. McCarrick now lives in a house here in Jacksonville, as did Maciel, over the objections of the local bishop who claims that he has nothing to do with this. It’s probably true because he’s very weak. But Bergoglio doesn’t care anyway.
> What sources of information other than the bishops? That’s their job. <
But the Pope is more than just a religious figure. He is the absolute ruler of a nation-state. So he has the means to gather information outside of normal channels.
It is something like being President of the United States. The President relies on the State Department for foreign policy advice. But the President has other sources. The CIA, the NSA, etc.
You and I are pretty much on the same side here. We both respect JPII, and we both deplore what the gay mafia has done to the Church. I am just less willing to give JPII a pass in this regard. And that’s because I don’t want some future pope to make the same mistakes he did.
Applies only to very limited circumstances.
Oh, I agree....I don’t think JPII gets a pass. In fact, while I think he was personally saintly and generally orthodox, he was a terrible Pope because he simply ignored the administrative aspect of “the job.” He left everything to others and just accepted the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy as it was. This was true of the various local churches, too - one of the reasons that nobody wanted to look too closely at McCarrick was that he was a dynamite fundraiser and political wheeler dealer who funneled a lot of money and perks to Rome as well as his own diocese, wherever he was.
I think JPII believed that personal holiness would carry the day, but unfortunately if you’re in that position, you have the responsibility for assuring the holiness of all the Church. He was personally very popular and I think he saw his constant travels as bringing the Faith to people in the person of the Pope. And it’s true that one met people all the time who had come back to the practice of the Faith because of JPII, or people who had come over to the pro-life side because of him, etc. On the other hand, this created a sort of a cult of personality around him while the Church itself was falling into disarray, or rather preserving and worsening the disarray resulting from VII and Paul VI.
A final thing is that JPII was very sick for most of his papacy, not only after the assassination attempt, but after his bouts with misdiagnosed cancer, etc. He really wasn’t running the Church much of the time (the SOS seems to have been the one in charge). I read a foreign commentator who said that they should verify the signature on his last few years of documents and orders, and pointed out that while he was incapacitated and mostly bedridden in his last couple of years, some 20 bishops were appointed. By whom?
I think one of the reasons that BXVI resigned was that he realized that he was powerless against the bureaucracy, which just ignored his orders because that’s what they were used to doing, and also because he feared that his advancing age would make him even less able to have any effect. It’s too bad things turned out the way they did with his successor, who is nothing if not a man of the “deep Church” bureaucracy.
....making it a very convenient tool for doctrinal wiggleroom.
Quite the opposite.
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