Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
THE VATICAN’S RETIRED ambassador to the US has purportedly penned an 11-page letter accusing senior Vatican officials of knowing as early as 2000 that the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, regularly invited seminarians into his bed but they still promoted him to cardinal.
The letter, an extraordinary intervention from a one-time Holy See diplomat, also accuses Pope Francis of having initially rehabilitated McCarrick despite being informed of his penchant for young seminarians in 2013, soon after he was elected pope.
The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published the letter attributed to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano today as the pope is in Ireland on a two-day visit.
Yesterday, Pope Francis met eight survivors of clerical, religious and institutional abuse.
Vigano (77) a conservative whose hard-line anti-gay views are well-known, also urged the reformist pope to resign over the issue.
The Vatican didn’t immediately comment or confirm the letter’s authenticity.
Lifetime of penance and prayer
In the letter, Vigano accused the former Vatican secretaries of state under the previous two popes of having ignored detailed denunciations against McCarrick for years. He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer, but that Francis subsequently rehabilitated him.
Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation as cardinal last month, after a US church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.
Since then, another man has come forward saying McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary.
The accusations have led to a crisis in confidence in the US hierarchy, because it was apparently an open secret that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed.
Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report — which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses — the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick’s misdeeds.
Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions with his lengthy note.
In it, he identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair, an unthinkable expose for a Vatican diplomat to make. He said there are documents backing up his version of events in Vatican archives.
Vigano, the Vatican’s ambassador to the US from 2011-2016, said his two immediate predecessors “did not fail” to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000.
He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on 23 June 2013, at the Vatican’s Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.
Vigano wrote that he told Francis: “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.”
Vigano wrote he was surprised to find that McCarrick started travelling on missions on behalf of the church soon thereafter, including to China. McCarrick was known to have been one of the Vatican’s intermediaries in the US-Cuba talks in 2014.
The letter also contains a lengthy diatribe about homosexuals in the Catholic Church. It often reads like an ideological manifesto, naming all of Francis’ known supporters in the US hierarchy as being complicit in a cover-up of McCarrick’s misdeeds.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
The level of abuse nurses and other healthcare staff have to put up with on a daily basis is outrageous. There doesn’t seem to be much support from management on these issues so I’m with them on this. The workplace should be safe and free from all of this. God knows their job is hard enough as it is
@Declan Moran: I totally agree with you on this. I would go a bit further and say there is NO support from management or the HSE desk jockeys. I admire the perseverance of medical staff in these difficult circumstances.
@Declan Moran: Not to take away, but I’ll add in our Firefighters. How anyone can attack them when trying to save lives. There needs to be harsh & consistent sentences for anyone attacking these vital (nurse/doctor/firefighters) people.
@Richard Starling: Not to knock the argument with regards to the abuse that these folk endure; but the HSE management really have little recourse to do anything. And as a former healthcare worker – I have no gra for HSE management.
@Alan Wright: You could add paramedics to that list.
It is beyond my compression how anyone can abuse either verbally or physically medical staff. This behaviour should never be tolerated .
@Patrick Lynch: ——-But it is, by the H.S.E. authorities AND THE COURTS,
@Patrick Lynch: The sad reality of working on the frontline is that verbal abuse originates mostly from your own medical and nursing colleagues – all of whom are painfully overworked and overstressed. It is tolerated – but that does not make it okay.
Strike..
There is not a chance that the nurses will strike in any meaningful way for pay and conditions. They have a union that appears to be in the pocket of the govt and as a profession who care about their patients they will avoid anything that would negatively impact their patients. The result is they are underpaid and placed under poor working conditions. The govt and the public will continue to take them for granted until the profession becomes so unattractive that standards and quality of those entering the profession drop and it is only at this point that the public will be effected and at that point it will be too late to reverse. We value solicitors, accountants, TDs, senators, estate agents, etc in this country, nurses we don’t value.
Strike. Bring this government to its knees. Hospital have become very dangerous places to go. Our health care staff are burnt out.
There should be security guards in all emergency departments
@Paulco: There is, but they’re normally not present when a patient is being assessed. Assaults usually happen when the care worker and the aggressor are one to one.
Any so called strike will be a day, or two at most. The preparation for the strike will include plans to ensure the minimum effect on patient care. Already there is the problem. Those demonstrating will be mainly sacrificing rest days or turning up on a leave day. My wife is a nurse manager, so deals with endless emails, rosters, HSE admin demands. Should she demonstrate or picket, she will have to work a v long day the next day to catch up. Aside from some cancelled non urgent appts, any strike will have zero effect. The INMO have no imagination. Two practical things they could do is campaign against the demand for nurses to have to pay each year to be allowed work (registration fee, imagine!) or HSE taking months to be able to issue a retired staff members first pay slip
Ah yes – the age old excuse of blaming the HSE – lol. In reality the HSE is dogged by the same bureaucratic red tape that has delayed all progress in this country for many years.
To put things in context, let me say I am a former front-line healthcare worker who spent 20 years busting my gut to care for people in a system that barely provides for its own. I did burn out. And I left, and honestly have never looked back.
The problem is above the level of the HSE. Our own government does not provide for our people.
Lack of hospital beds, lack of doctors/nurses… compounded by lack of adequate on site staff parking facilities, poor conditions – and all of that before we even begin to deal with the fact that on any given day, almost 25% of hospital beds are occupied by people who could be cared for in the community, but the community health support network is so non-existent, that they cannot be discharged.
Couple that with big decisions like building new hospitals – the childrens hospital for example; in 2010 it was unveiled as going to built on the Mater hospital site – until Dublin City Council intervened and objected to a staff car-park that would be required, which delayed things yet again, before ultimately being built elsewhere in an equally inaccessible part of the city (which ranks in the top 10 for worst traffic in the world).
The budgetary overruns involved are not the fault of the HSE – but our government. The delays in its delivery are not the fault of the HSE – but our government. The lack of a decent community healthcare support network is not the fault of the HSE – but our government. The lack of housing for not only our own people, but the refugees that our government agreed to house, are again the fault of our government.
When do we finally say – enough is enough?
As a health care worker there is no clear protocol in the HSE to complain against abusive patients.
Yet abusive patients can complain and readily be abusive to a person merely trying to do their job.
Surely under employment law a person deserves respect in the workplace???
HAving dealth with the HSE at many diferent levels, from patitent to advocate. I have to agree with the front line staff.
Sitting i a hospital corridor will tech you loads. Thhe amount of people carrying sheets of paper outnumbers the amount of frontline staff.
Try to get documentation and it takes forever and it costs a fortune. Getting and FIS can take what feels like a liofetime.
Slaintecare is supposed to solve this but the HSE Mandarins will not let go of their power easily. Betwwn them and the ncivil servants in the Dept of Health they weild a lot of power and have no intention of letting oit go withiut a hell of a fight.
@Gary Kearney: Slaintecare is an utter mess, and will not do anything to solve the issues.
First and foremost, we need digital health records available nationwide; so that Jo Bloggs’ health record from Navan, who fell off his cousins ladder in Claremorris while trying to fix his roof, is accessible to the well meaning doctors in UCHG etc.
Encryption does not need to cost the earth – leave it dependent on the consumer to decide their own encryption key/level. If they make it impossible then great for them – so long as they have decided on an ICE contact who has access to their key.
Personally – I am more concerned with my financial security than my health records – and they (the banks) have no problem unilaterally deciding what is supposedly secure.
@Gary Kearney: And Slaintecare is designed by the HSE mandarins you describe :(
thought she was Gemma O’Doherty
have your say