If Pope Francis resigns it could tear the Catholic Church apart

The allegation by a former senior Vatican diplomat that Pope Francis vigorously covered up sex abuse is looking more credible by the day. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, says he told Francis in 2013 that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired Archbishop of Washington, was a serial abuser of seminarians. The Pope ignored him, he claims – and lifted sanctions placed by Benedict XVI on McCarrick. Moreover, he fully rehabilitated the old man, who became one of his most trusted advisers. Viganò has called on Francis to resign.

We can now be reasonably certain that Benedict, after a deplorable delay, did punish McCarrick, whom independent sources have confirmed was forced out of the seminary where he lived in retirement and moved to a new home in Washington DC. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, current Archbishop of Washington, says he knew nothing of McCarrick’s crimes or punishment. That claim seems implausible.

Even some of the cardinals most closely allied to Francis, such as Blase Cupich of Chicago, appearing to be tiptoeing away from a profoundly damaged pontiff. Cardinal Cupich has issued a statement calling Viganò’s 11-page testimony ‘astonishing’ and denying its claim that he was given the prime see of Chicago at the behest of McCarrick. But he has not defended the Pope against Viganò’s charge that he culpably protected and promoted a sinister predator; instead he has called for a ‘thorough vetting’ of his testimony.

An article by Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review sums up the private thinking of many cardinals, bishops, priests and laity, who are joining the dots between the rehabilitation of McCarrick and previous examples of Francis turning a blind eye to the wrongdoing of his allies. ‘The record of Francis’s pontificate is such that it is easier than it should be to credit the accusation that he would knowingly rehabilitate a progressive but morally dissolute cardinal and grant him greater influence in the Church’, writes Dougherty.