Pope tells bishops to fight abuse, culture behind

VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis on Saturday told the newly ordained Bishops that they should reject any form of abuse and work in communion to fight the clerical culture that has fueled the scandal of sexual abuse and concealment that shakes his papacy.

Francis cited his recent letter on combating abuse in an audience with 74 new bishops from 34 developing countries. The bishops are in Rome this week to learn to lead their dioceses.

Their seminary came during a crisis moment for Francis, accused by a single archbishop of concealing a disgraced former cardinal, who in turn was accused of sexually assaulting children as well as adult seminarians. .

Francis ignored the calls of the clergy and ordinary faithful to respond directly to claims, saying that there are times when "silence and prayer" are the best answer.

Francis, however, spoke of the crisis of abuse to new bishops, many of whom are from dioceses where the scandal of clerical sexual abuse has not broken out in the same way as in the Anglo-Saxon world, in Europe and in some parts of the world. Latin America.

"It's enough to say no to abuse – of power, of conscience or of any type," said Francis, adding that to do this, they had to reject the clerical culture that often places the clergy on a pedestal.

Francis also told the new bishops that they were there to serve their flocks and that they had to work in communion with the church, not as isolated actors.

"The bishop can not have all the gifts – the complete set of charisms – even if some people think that they do, bad things," said Francis. The church, he said, needs the unity of bishops "and not isolated actors working outside the choir, leading their own personal struggles".

It was perhaps an indirect blow to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who broke with centuries of Vatican protocol and pontifical secrecy to name and denounce two decades of concealment by bishops, cardinals and popes of the Vatican. .

The bombing charges of Vigano plunged the papacy into a crisis, with a steady stream of revelations about who knew what and about McCarrick – and what they did with that information.

Catholic News Service, the press agency of the American Bishops' Conference, on Friday issued a 2006 letter from a senior Vatican official confirming that the Holy See already knew in 2000 that McCarrick wanted to invite seminarians to his bed.

The letter, from Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, confirmed a key element of Vigano's testimony: that a New York priest, Reverend Boniface Ramsay, had written to the Vatican ambassador in November 2000 complaining about the behavior from McCarrick.

Earlier, it was reported that a group of worried Americans had gone to the Vatican in 2000 to complain about McCarrick, and Ramsay himself had said he had written this letter in 2000.

But the documentary evidence of Sandri's missive in 2006 confirms that Ramsay's 2000 letter had arrived at the Vatican, had not been lost in a pile of mail or ignored, and was still present and relevant six years later. ask Ramsay for information about a job applicant.

Vatican observers likened McCarrick's scandal of dissimulation to that of Reverend Marcial Maciel, the most famous pedophile of the 20th century Catholic Church, whose sexual crimes against children have been ignored for decades by the Vatican. vocations.

Like Maciel, McCarrick was a powerful and popular prelate who channeled millions of dollars to the Vatican. He apparently got a calculated pass for what many members of the church hierarchy would either have dismissed as an ideologically-fueled rumor, or dismissed as a mere "moral foul" when sleeping with adult men.

In July, Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as a cardinal after an investigation by an American church determined that an allegation that he had toyed with a teenage altar in the 1970s was believable.

McCarrick's attorney stated that the allegations against him were serious and that he intended to invoke his right to due process at the appropriate time.