“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

— Deacon David Jones

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

The Trial of Cardinal Becciu, the Betrayal of Cardinal Pell

In December 2023 Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, the first prelate in history to face trial in a Vatican court, was convicted of embezzlement and money laundering.

Credits: Left, CNS; Right, CNS/Paul Haring

In December 2023 Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, the first prelate in history to face trial in a Vatican court, was convicted of embezzlement and money laundering.

January 10, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

I recently explained to a friend concerned about the emergence of accounts of historic abuse by priests that mainstream media often save such stories to run them near Christmas and Easter. The motive of the left-leaning media in this seems obvious. It is to drive a wedge between Catholics and their Church. So it was doubly distressing when lurid stories of criminal behavior were generated from the highest levels of Church authority during the Advent and Christmas seasons this year.

A Cardinal Once Seen as Future Pope Now Faces Prison.” That shocking headline was a front page story by Francis X. Rocca in the December 13, 2023 edition of The Wall Street Journal. Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints, has stood accused by Vatican investigators of the crimes of embezzlement and money laundering since 2020. Trial for the then 75-year-old prelate commenced in 2021. In the weeks before Christmas in 2023, he was convicted of the charges and sentenced to a prison term of five-and-a-half years.

Cardinal Becciu is the first cardinal in Church history to face criminal charges in a Vatican court. According to the Rocca article, five others also faced criminal charges in the same case. They included other Vatican officials and outsiders. The case centered on a failed Vatican investment in a high-end London property and “the alleged theft of money intended to free a kidnapped nun but reportedly spent instead on resort vacations and luxury goods from Prada and Louis Vuitton,” according to Rocca. This story could not be worse.

The trial, which concluded near Christmas, included “accusations of Vatican vendettas as well as Becciu’s secretly recorded conversation with the pope.” Mr. Rocca reported that Pope Francis changed Church laws during the investigation in ways that defendants’ lawyers said favored the prosecution and violated the right to a fair trial — “including a broader authority to eavesdrop on suspects.”

Prior to his role as prefect for the Vatican office, Cardinal Becciu had been in the official role of “Substitute for General Affairs.” Mr. Rocca described this role as “effectively the pope’s chief of staff.” Becciu served in this capacity for the last two years of the pontificate of Benedict XVI and at least the first five years of the papacy of Francis. Becciu described this role, reported by journalist Francis X. Rocca, in 2018: “The substitute is, so to speak, the one who has no time for himself but must give it first to the Holy Father and therefore be willing to take any of his calls and favor any of his initiatives.”

It was Francis who elevated Becciu to the rank of cardinal and appointed him to his role overseeing the canonization of Saints. When the charges of money laundering and embezzlement emerged in 2020, Pope Francis asked him to resign.

Cardinal Becciu, Pope Francis, Cardinal Pell [Credits: CNS/Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters, CBCEW, Daniel Ibanez/CNA/EWTN]

Who’s Left on the Side of Right?

Several biographies of Pope Francis point to Vatican corruption as a primary impetus for his elevation to the papacy in the conclave of 2013. In my post, “Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy,” I described the conditions under which Benedict XVI shocked the world with his decision to step down from the Chair of Peter. His final year was marred by Vatican corruption, especially revolving around Vatican finances. The betrayals and political machinations in Rome became legendary.

The word, “machination” refers to a crafty scheme or cunning design for the accomplishment of a sinister end. There were several such schemes at work in the background that caused Benedict XVI to conclude, as he did in his February 2013 announcement, that he must step down:

“I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

In the years to follow the 2013 conclave, one scandal after another emerged from Rome. Writing for The New York Times in 2018, conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat wrote of the “latest bomb” to go off in “an already cratered Catholic landscape.” The bomb then was an 11-page “testimony” from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States, accusing Pope Francis of shielding and enabling a serial abuser, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, by releasing him from restrictions on his activities and travel.

The restrictions had been imposed by Benedict XVI in the wake of revelations that McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians for years. Cardinal McCarrick had been restricted by Benedict to a life of prayer and penance, but ignored it. According to columnist Robert George writing in The Washington Post in 2018, “Pope Francis ignored it as well.”

Ross Douthat attributed this decision of Francis to the fact that he “needed allies” in the ongoing struggle between conservative and liberal Catholics. This is a scandal of its own. Douthat reported that McCarrick “was sympathetic to the Pope’s planned liberalizing push.” The irony was that liberal Catholics, the very ones who championed full exposure of the sexual abuse crisis, were willing to look the other way when Francis promoted McCarrick, removed his disciplinary sanctions, and corralled his help for an obsessive agenda to thwart Catholic conservatives. Some have suggested that such obsessive concerns helped to keep rogue Vatican actors like Cardinal Becciu from scrutiny. When the spotlight of obsession is on sexual abuse alone, money flows freely in the surrounding darkness.


When Cardinal Pell Was Accused

The case against Cardinal George Pell was also influenced by nefarious machinations, including police and prosecutor corruption. This was at the heart of a curious incident related in Prison Journal (Volume 1, p. 329). At a pretrial hearing on Cardinal Pell’s false sexual abuse charges, among the most difficult charges to defend against, a Melbourne, Australia priest who was present in the court told Pell’s supporters that he prays that the prosecutor will “mess up his presentation.” When that actually happened, the priest reportedly said, “See, my prayers are working!” When Cardinal Pell was told of this he said, “I would have much preferred that he prayed for justice to be done.”

Those were the spontaneous words of an innocent man who believed that justice in this life is possible — even likely. The guilty on the other hand engage in any number of contrived machinations to do an end run around the law. When a defendant is innocent and there is no evidence supporting the charge, it is too often police and prosecutors who resort to machinations to do an end run around the law.

There is a vivid example of this on the same page of Pell’s Prison Journal cited above. Detective Sgt. Kevin Carson of the Ballarat, Australia Police Department produced a report claiming that sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Victoria — where Pell was facing trial — was responsible for forty-three suicides. After the shocking story was leaked to tabloid media, a parliamentary inquiry into the Church’s handling of sexual abuse was launched. An inquiry is similar to a grand jury report in the United States.

The police set up an investigation, but were able to identify only twenty-five of the forty-three named by Detective Carson. Of those twenty-five names, only sixteen had committed suicide. But only one of the sixteen had been assaulted by a member of the clergy. As Pell himself pointed out, “One is one too many, but one is not forty-three.” This tendency to “heighten the hype” lends itself to unfair trials and wrongful convictions, but it also lends itself to career advancement, a shamefully strong force in many of the US grand jury reports on Catholic clergy.

In his analysis of the Cardinal Becciu trial in The Wall Street Journal cited above, Francis X. Rocca included the following paragraph:

“Around that time, Francis made Australian Cardinal George Pell his finance chief and gave him sweeping powers. Pell unveiled new financial guidelines for the Vatican. But he clashed with the secretariat, which opposed his plans for a financial audit by an external auditing firm. Pell considered Becciu his main opponent.... Other Vatican officials also lobbied the Pope against Pell’s changes. The Pope curtailed Pell’s powers and the external audit was canceled. Pell later returned to Australia to face child sex abuse charges. He was acquitted on appeal and died” [on January 10, 2023].

In an October 15, 2023 published commentary on Mr. Rocca’s account in The Wall Street Journal, I added some further context to the story:

“The part of this nebulous story that most troubles me is the decision of the Pope to listen to Cardinal Becciu and other Vatican officials who lobbied against Cardinal George Pell’s financial reforms even after [ the Pope] had empowered him to reform Vatican finances. Mr. Rocca does not speculate on the source of charges against Cardinal Pell in Australia — charges for which he was exonerated in a unanimous decision of Australia’s High Court. This was after he wrongly spent 400 days in prison. There are many who believe that there may have been a connection between these false charges and Cardinal Pell’s attempted reforms of Vatican finances. Pell himself suspected this.”

Book cover image courtesy of Ignatius Press; Red cardinal photo by RachidH (CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)

Many Unanswered Questions

In Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal Volume 2, in an entry dated 2 August 2018, he devoted several pages to an article of mine, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” The article had been sent to him in prison by Sheryl Collmer, a columnist for Crisis magazine. (The full excerpt now appears at our “Voices from Beyond” feature. )

My article drew a parallel between an accuser’s testimony in the trial of Cardinal Pell and that of another accuser in an unrelated case reported in Rolling Stone magazine by a now disgraced reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. It turned out that there was indeed a connection, and the Erdely article was widely read in Australia before Pell was accused. As Francis X. Rocca observed in The Wall Street Journal excerpt above, “Pell considered Becciu his main opponent.” Is there something further to be deduced from this? Consider this 2020 entry from the Australia site Wrongful Convictions Report — “Cardinal Pell ... well, well, well”:

“Italian media have reported that Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, 72, is suspected of wiring 700,000 euros to recipients in Australia who helped to ensure hostile testimony in the trial of Cardinal George Pell, who was accused of molesting choir boys in Melbourne in the 1990s. Becciu, days after being sacked by the Pope, denies the truth of the reports.”

Consider also these further entries in Cardinal Pell’s Journal written from his prison cell:

  • Friday, 2 August 2019: “The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019. No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations was also a fantasy or a fiction. I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause.”

  • Sunday, 27 October 2019: “I finished reading a collection of articles from 23 October 2019 on the Vatican finance scandals ... [One] article mentioned Msgr Cesare Burgazzi, who worked in the Vatican Secretariat of State on the finances who became disillusioned by his discovery of a parallel bank, another IOR, and was then removed from his position through media accusations of sexual behavior which were later shown to be completely baseless. I had not heard of this.” [Emphasis added].

  • Thursday, 14 November 2019: “So far, the Vatican financial scandals have not bitten as deeply, especially in Australia, but they are a scandal of incompetence exploited by criminals.... Becciu had given an interview to a journalist as he was under pressure, which is not surprising.”

  • Thursday, 28 November 2019: “Cardinal Becciu furiously denounced as ‘another false article’ Ed Condon’s accurate account on the London property fiasco and of the accounting procedures which attempted to conceal it.” [Footnote: Ed Condon, “Vatican Officials: Swiss Bank Suspected of Money Laundering led to Pell Conflict,” Catholic World Report, 21 November 2019.]

  • Saturday, 30 November 2019: “I am becoming more interested in trying to put together the early stages in the evolution of the charges against me. Why were the charges first ascribed to 1997 instead of 1996? When was Sunday Mass introduced as a setting for the crime? Who helped the complainant? When did the similarities with the [Rolling Stone’s] Billy Doe incidents in Philadelphia emerge?”

Cardinal Pell’s last question now haunts this story: “Is there a Rome connection?

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: I continue to feel an obligation to the late Cardinal Pell to uncover the truth of this story whenever and wherever possible. Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Excerpt: From the Prison Journal of Cardinal Pell, 2 August 2019

Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely's Rolling Stone

The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek


The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

 
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Pope Francis in the Dock by Archbishop Carlo María Viganò

Described as “an atomic bomb dropped on the Roman Curia,” a former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States has accused Pope Francis of covering up some Cardinal sins.

Described as “an atomic bomb dropped on the Roman Curia,” a former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States accused Pope Francis of covering up some Cardinal sins.

I was just sitting on my bunk in my prison cell on Sunday night, August 26, after a tiring day on multiple fronts. I went through the day without a single message on the GTL tablet I was holding. It was unusual, the calm before the storm. I spent a few minutes at night playing one of its solitaire games that I can never seem to win. Several minutes later I exited the game to find a surprise. In that brief ten minutes, l9 messages had come into my GTL inbox. Before the night was over, there were nine more.

The summer of Catholic scandal had just detonated its third and most explosive bomb, and several readers sent me alerts and commentary. Archbishop Carlo María Viganò (pro. “vee-ga-NO”), a former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, published an 11-page letter on two Catholic websites.

The published letter charged that Pope Francis, six months after assuming the papacy in 2013, revoked restrictions placed by Pope Benedict XVI on the ministry of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick when Pope Benedict learned of his history of sexual abuse of seminarians. Archbishop Viganò claims that he personally made Pope Francis aware that Cardinal McCarrick had been restricted to a life of prayer and penance, but simply ignored it.

The letter also claimed, among other charges, that Pope Francis ignored it as well, restoring Cardinal McCarrick to a position of power and influence as a papal advisor. Cardinal McCarrick, according to the letter, thus became instrumental in the naming of two other American prelates, Cardinal Joseph Tobin in Newark and Cardinal Blase Cupich in Chicago.

On the day this all exploded, it made for dismal reading long into the night. You need a scorecard to sort out the details of this three-strike story. First in the summer of Catholic scandal came revelations that Cardinal McCarrick, age 88, stands accused of groping a 16-year-old boy in the sacristy of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City in 1971, long before he became a bishop and then a cardinal.

The claim has been presented as both credible and substantiated, but in a post, on Beyond These Stone Walls (linked below) I described this to be a matter related more to expediency than evidence. “Credible” simply means that both McCarrick and the 16-year-old lived in New York City in 1971. “Substantiated” is another matter and, absent evidence, eyewitness testimony, or an admission of the accused — and there were none of these — it defies belief. As I have pointed out, the 16-year-old is now 63.

But this bombshell has morphed into a bigger one that is far more credible and substantiated. A barrage of sordid stories has emerged about Cardinal McCarrick engaging in a decades-long pattern of homosexual predation of seminarians and younger priests. He became notorious for this, the current disclaimers of bishops notwithstanding.

These tales, and those of his now infamous beach house were familiar to many former seminarians and priests east of the Mississippi in the 1980s and 1990s. I was one of them. Meanwhile, every bishop and fellow prelate has either feigned ignorance or kept silent. In “Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix,” I speculated upon three questions:

  • Who knew what and when did they know it?

  • What did they do once they did know it?

  • Why is this all coming up now?

The central point of that post was something that each of the polar camps seldom considers as this story heightens a debate about the moral prerequisites for priesthood:

“I have encountered another condition among many, but certainly not all, homosexual seminarians and priests. I found the prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder among them to be inordinately high. Perhaps it is inordinately high in the wider ‘gay community’ as well.

I believe it is this disorder, and not simply same-sex attraction, that is the real impediment to Holy Orders. It is this that must be detected and treated as an impediment for seminary candidates. Narcissistic personality disorder is one of the most difficult personality disorders to treat and modify. One of its symptoms is the objectification of others for one’s own gratification.”

In other words, there is a developmental and psychological difference between a person who experiences same-sex attraction but remains celibate, and one who becomes a predator. Behaviors such as stalking and grooming are inherently narcissistic.

But before anyone launches a Catholic witch hunt, narcissism is a pathology not at all related to sexual orientation, although I and others have cited a higher presence of narcissistic behavior among homosexual men than heterosexual men. This was supported in a subsequent article by Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons, MD, on LifeSiteNews.

I did not intend to analyze Cardinal McCarrick in the above post, but if the behaviors with seminarians now attributed to him are true, then one could legitimately conclude that he became a manipulative, narcissistic predator. Some of what Archbishop Viganò now alleges in his 11-page bombshell letter lends credibility to this. He wrote that McCarrick was privately disciplined for these behaviors by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, but the Cardinal “openly flouted the papal sanctions.”

 

The Second Bombshell: Pennsylvania

The news media, for the most part, looked the other way during the Cardinal McCarrick bombshell, and the reasons for that were political. I examined them in “The McCarrick Report and the Silence of the Sacrificial Lambs.” Then another bomb dropped, this time in Pennsylvania but with reverberations across the country and around the world.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro published a Grand Jury report that exposed 300 Pennsylvania priests accused of sexually abusing 1,000 victims over a period of seventy years. Nothing in this report is new, some of it is untrue, and much of it is politically motivated. I wrote about this report in detail in “Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Joseph Goebbels In ‘The Reckoning’.”

I think I speak for many conscientious Catholics when I say that we have grown tired of upwardly mobile political careerists like AG Shapiro who allude that questioning claimants or asking for evidence “re-victimizes the victims.” Claims in the Pennsylvania report date back as far as World War II and most of the priests accused are long deceased. Many others who are still living were denied any opportunity to defend themselves. There are serious flaws, and multiple injustices, associated with this report. (Note: In the elections of November 2022, Josh Shapiro was elected Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania.)

The news media that ignored or minimized the Cardinal McCarrick story pounced on the Pennsylvania story ignoring its many flaws, lack of due process and substantiation, and the fact that it was a grotesque abuse of the grand jury system. It served a purpose for the leftist media by momentarily moving the spotlight back onto the moral panic about child abuse and off a politically less desirable truth: that homosexual predatory behavior has been the real ground-zero of the crisis.

That crisis is manifested in a 50-year history of narcissistic homosexual inclination and behavior among a significant number of seminarians, priests, and bishops. And according to Archbishop Viganò’s published letter, it is a reality with tentacles that have reached deeply into Vatican affairs.

The hypocrisy it has borne along with it never ceases. In light of the third and biggest bombshell, the accusations brought by Archbishop Viganò, USCCB President Daniel Cardinal Dinardo had this to say:

“Archbishop Viganò’s letter raised questions that deserve answers that are conclusive and based on evidence. Without those answers, innocent men may be tainted by false accusations and the guilty may be left to repeat sins of the past.”

I agree. But with all due respect, Your Eminence, there are many accused U.S. priests who deserve answers that are conclusive and based on evidence. Innocent men have been tainted — imprisoned even — by false accusations, and Cardinal McCarrick is evidence that some of the apparently guilty have been left to repeat the sins of the past. The U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter applied only to priests while exempting bishops.

 

The “Atomic Bomb” and Its Fallout

Now, with the revelations of Archbishop Carlo María Viganò, it seems that some who feigned shock over Cardinal McCarrick already knew, and had known for years, about his history of luring seminarians into a homosexual Catholic subculture of predation, compromise, and secrecy.

Archbishop Viganò’s document alleges that he personally informed Pope Francis of the above in Rome shortly after the conclave of 2013. Without apparent consultation with Pope Emeritus Benedict, Pope Francis met with McCarrick, appeared to revoke the canonical sanctions imposed by Pope Benedict, and restored Cardinal McCarrick to a position of power and influence. The media coverage of this story has been amazing. A lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal (“Pope Francis in the Dock,” August 29, 2018) chided the left for downplaying the story:

“The archbishop’s charges have split the Catholic community. Some defend [Acb. Viganò’s] reputation for honesty and professionalism while others suggest he is motivated by dislike for Pope Francis. Some secular defenders who like the pope’s politics, and are stalwarts of the #MeToo movement, want to excuse the episode… But motives are irrelevant here, or at least should be. The question is whether the archbishop’s claims are true.”

In an op-ed in The New York Times (“A Catholic Civil War?” August 27, 2018) First Things senior editor Matthew Schmitz described the fallout of the bombs of the summer of 2018 and Archbishop Viganò’s letter to be evidence of our polar ideologies:

“No matter what Francis does now, the Catholic Church has been plunged into all-out civil war. On one side are the traditionalists, who insist that abuse can be prevented only by tighter adherence to church doctrine. On the other side are liberals, who demand that the church cease condemning homosexual acts and allow gay priests to step out of the closet.”

I do not at all agree with this assessment of the state of affairs in the Holy See. This is not a matter of simple polarity, but of truth. Getting at that truth is something owed to the Church. How best to do this is the next big question. Some more conservative commentators have cast a series of doubts about the integrity of Pope Francis in the light of what is presently alleged. Others on the left attack Viganò.

Those in the media, often of a more liberal mindset, have suggested that Archbishop Viganò should be treated with a degree of skepticism. John Allen, formerly Rome Correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and presently president of Crux Catholic Media wrote that “The proper attitude is to take [the Viganò letter] seriously but with a large grain of salt [and] healthy skepticism.”

Mr. Allen cited as a reason for “healthy skepticism” Archbishop Viganò’s “unsubstantiated” accusations against other church leaders in the same document, and the Archbishop’s history as an emphatic critic of the pope’s liberal views on divorce and homosexuality. The Rev. Robert Imbelli, emeritus professor of theology at Boston College — in the epicenter of the 2002 abuse scandal — suggested that the pope “leaves it to journalists and their professional competence to evaluate the truth.”

I am sorry, but “journalists and their professional competence” may seem a cruel joke to anyone who has been victimized by the news media’s total lack of John Allen’s “healthy skepticism” when it comes to coverage — and the most basic truth-telling — about Catholic scandal. For the best commentary on the media’s lack of “healthy skepticism” see JoAnn Wypijewski’s courageous media comeuppance: “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.”

 

Vigano: Impeccable Integrity or Caped Crusader?

Despite some of the aspersions against his integrity and motives, any honest assessment of Archbishop Viganò’s Vatican-based career can lead to only one conclusion. He has been a servant of the Church of the highest caliber, exhibiting moral fortitude and integrity — sometimes at great cost to himself.

In 2012, the Vatican’s most powerful powerbroker under Pope Benedict XVI, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, engineered a plot to move Acb. Viganò out of Rome. He was transferred against his will from his position as Deputy Governor of Vatican City to a post as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, a position that Viganò interpreted as “exile.”

America is not normally considered a place of exile, but it’s easy to understand why Viganò saw it that way. His reforms in the financial structure of Vatican City halted the scourge of nepotism and corruption. His department went from a 10 million Euro Debt to a 30 million Euro surplus in one year. He ended corrupt contracts and replaced them with legitimate ones. In the ordinary course, this would be a good reason to keep him around.

So his “exile” was perplexing. His letter of appeal to Pope Benedict was never answered when he was sent to Washington DC. It was from this move that Acb. Viganò was unwittingly placed in a position between the affairs of Rome and the Archdiocese of Washington where, he says, Cardinal Donald Wuerl also became keenly aware of censures placed on Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict, but chose not to enforce them. Cardinal Wuerl denies this, a position that grows weaker by the day.

This is not the last word. Without doubt, there is more to come. Until it does, I am a loyal and steadfast supporter of the pope until clear evidence loosens that knot. Nonetheless, every visible and credible source measures Archbishop Carlo María Viganò as a man of great integrity and courage. We would all be fools not to listen.

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Editor’s Note: This article and others like it can be found in our “Inside the Vatican” category in the BTSW Public Library. Please share this important post. And please consider these other related posts from Father Gordon MacRae and Beyond These Stone Walls:

 
 
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