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ROME – 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 fueled the scandal of sexual abuse and concealment that shakes his papacy.
Francis cited his recent letter on combating abuse at an audience with 74 new bishops from 34 developing countries. The bishops were in Rome for a training this week.
Their seminar took place during a crisis for the pope: a former papal diplomat claimed that Francis had concealed a former American cardinal, accused of sexually assaulting children and adult seminarians.
Francis ignored the calls of the clergy and ordinary faithful to respond directly to claims, claiming that there were times when "silence and prayer" were the best answer.
However, the pontiff spoke in a general manner of the scandal of the abuses of the Catholic Church against the new bishops. Many of these are from dioceses, where cases of misuse of money have not been reported publicly in the United States, Europe and parts of Latin America.
"Just say no to abuse – of power, of conscience or of any type," said Francis, adding that to do this, bishops must 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 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 battles."
It was perhaps an indirect blow to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who broke with centuries of Vatican protocol and pontifical secrets to name and denounce two decades of concealment of the bishops, cardinals and popes of the Vatican. .
Vigano said in particular that he spoke about McCarrick to Francis in 2013, but said Francis had nevertheless rehabilitated the American cardinal following the sanctions that Pope Benedict XVI would have imposed in 2009 or 2010.
The Vatican refused repeated requests for information on McCarrick's sanctions, if any, and what Francis had done about them.
The Vigano bomb charges plunged the papacy into a crisis, with a steady influx of revelations about who knew what and about McCarrick – and what they had done with that information.
Friday, Catholic Press Service, the press agency of the US Bishops' Conference, published in 2006 a letter from a senior Vatican official confirming that the Holy See knew from 2000 McCarrick's inclination to invite seminarians into bed.
Cardinal Leonardo Sandri's letter confirmed a key element of Vigano's testimony: A father from New York, Father Boniface Ramsay, wrote to the Vatican ambassador in November 2000 complaining about McCarrick's behavior.
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 compared McCarrick's scandal of dissimulation with that of Father Marcial Maciel, the most famous pedophile of the twentieth-century Catholic Church. The sexual crimes committed by Maciel against children have been ignored for decades by a Vatican more impressed by its ability to bring donations and 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 have either 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 the United States Church determined that an allegation that he had toyed with a teenage altar in the 1970s was credible .
McCarrick's lawyer stated that the charges against him were serious and that he intended to invoke his right to due process at the appropriate time.
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