Pope will meet with US bishops on Thursday over abuse scandal

VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis will meet a delegation of American cardinals and bishops on Thursday about the scandal of sexual abuse and the concealment of violence in the Catholic Church and his own papacy, the Vatican said on Tuesday.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he wants Francis to authorize a full-fledged Vatican inquiry into former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was withdrawn in July after a credible accusation.

DiNardo also said that recent accusations that senior Vatican officials – including the pope – have concealed McCarrick deserve answers.

Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said DiNardo would meet Francis Thursday at the Apostolic Palace, along with Cardinal Sean O'Malley, Francis's senior adviser on sexual abuse. Two figures of the American conference, Bishop Jose Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles, and Bishop Brian Bransfield, are also involved, according to a Vatican statement.

In July, Francis ordered McCarrick, at the age of 88, a life of penance and prayer while awaiting the result of a canonical trial on the groping allegation involving a Teenage altar in the 1970s. After the allegation was made public in June, it appeared that it was apparently an open secret – including in the Vatican – that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians and youth priests in his bed and harassed them.

The McCarrick scandal escalated two weeks ago after former Vatican ambassador Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano accused two dozen American and American cardinals and bishops of covering McCarrick for two decades.

Specifically, Vigano accused Francis of rehabilitating McCarrick with the canonical sanctions imposed on him by Benedict 2009 or 2010. The Vatican did not respond to the charges, but the promised "clarifications" will likely come after the Francis meeting with the great American church. leadership this week.

Francis refused to comment directly on Vigano's claims, but almost every day in the last two weeks, his morning Mass homily seemed somewhat related to the scandal.

On Tuesday, he drew Satan into the fray, suggesting that the devil was behind Vigano's revelations.

"In these times, it seems that the" great accuser "was unleashed and was used by the bishops," he said. "In truth, we are all sinners, bishops. He tries to discover the sins so that they are visible in order to scandalize people. "

The bishops, he says, should be men of prayer and should know that they have been chosen by God and stay close to their flock.

In another comment on Tuesday, a contributor to Francis and Benedict said that the sex abuse scandal was such a shifting catastrophe for the church that it was "September 11".

Archbishop Georg Gaenswein said in a presentation that he was in no way comparing the scandal to the nearly 3,000 people killed in the United States 17 years ago, September 11, 2001 .

But he said the scandal that had lasted for years and the recent revelations of the Pennsylvania grand jury report simply showed "how many souls were irrevocably and mortally wounded by priests of the Catholic Church."

"Today, even the Catholic Church seems full of confusion during its own September 11, September 11, even though this disaster is not associated with a single date, but on days and nights. years and countless victims. " he said.

While no one has attacked churches with planes filled with passengers, the latest news from the United States "sends a message even more terrible than the sudden collapse of all the churches in Pennsylvania and the Basilica of the Sanctuary of the United States." Immaculate. Design in Washington. "

Gaenswein, who is Benedict's secretary and prefect of Francis' papal home, was speaking at the presentation of a book by conservative American author Rod Dreher, who has been at the forefront of the recent McCarrick scandal. and Vigano.

Gaenswein recalled that during a trip to the United States in 2008, Benedict XVI spoke of the national sanctuary to denounce the "deep shame" and pain that the violence had caused to the Catholic community. Benedict is credited with having toured the Vatican on the issue of sexual abuse while he was cardinal, forcing bishops around the world to send him all their records for examination, as they did not sanction the authors of these acts.

Gaenswein said that Benedict's warning was "apparently in vain, as we see today."

"Neither the complaint of the Holy Father nor the assurances and formal promises promised by much of the hierarchy could contain the evil," he said.

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