The McCarrick Report Is Published: Four “Scapegoats”?

As I predicted, the truth is still unknown, because too many well placed Prelates are involved.

From Inside the Vatican

By Robert Moynihan

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

    And harder to script.

    What we confront today is a long-awaited “McCarrick Report” which was expected to bring clarity and so healing to the scandal of the former American cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, who betrayed the trust the Church placed in him by abusing many young men — including his own seminarians, who depended entirely on him for their ecclesial futures! — and a boy he himself baptized.

    But the Report issued by the Vatican today, November 10, after two years of careful investigations, does not bring that clarity, and that healing.

    Rather, it leaves us still in the ecclesial swamp of cover-up, evasion, and scapegoating of others.

    Four men are given the principal blame for not halting McCarrick’s spectacular rise in the Church.

    The four are:

    (1) Pope John Paul II, now canonized as St. John Paul II;

    (2) John Paul’ personal secretary, Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, now Cardinal Dziwisz;

    (3) Pope Benedict XVI, now Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI; and…

    (4) the whistle-blowing archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.

    Yes folks, no one else in the Church hierarchy had any more important role in the McCarrick affair than this saint, his secretary, a saintly retired Pope, and a truth-telling archbishop who has been vilified for telling the truths that he knows.

    The remarkable thing about this Report is that the final impression it gives is that four of the leading Churchmen of our time — two Popes and two of their closest collaborators — were the ones most responsible for allowing McCarrick to continue his career of serial abuse without being stopped by any Church authority.

    This is why I call it the “Report of the Four Scapegoats.”

    A first, still superficial reading, suggests that this is the essential message of this Report: that the Vatican of today did nothing wrong at all with regard to the case of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick… because it was largely the fault of four men who are no longer in active service: St. John Paul II, his personal secretary, then Monsignor, now Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, and, last but not least, retired Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò himself.

    John Paul is said to have promoted McCarrick to become Archbishop of Washington in 2001 after McCarrick wrote a letter to Dziwisz protesting that he was innocent of all the allegations being rumored against him. John Paul had already decided not to promote McCarrick. But McCarrick’s letter, presented to John Paul by his secretary — who noted that often in Poland the communists had blackened the names of good Churchmen in order to prevent them from being promoted and doing good work (the Report released today speaks abut this) — led John Paul to change his mind. He made McCarrick Archbishop of Washington. The Report is saying, as it were, that “it was John Paul’s fault.”

    Likewise, Pope Benedict is presented as being unwilling to place strict sanctions on McCarrick after McCarrick went into retirement, though he was informed of the many allegations against McCarrick. So the Report is saying, as it were, that “it was Benedict’s fault” that McCarrick was not sanctioned and reined in completely.

    Multiple global media outlets lost no time in quickly summarizing and assessing the Report’s key points, and in this way publishing the first draft of “the narrative” for this story, which is crucial for the credibility of the current Church leadership.

    That leadership has been accused in the court of public opinion of being deaf to the cries of the faithful for truly dramatic action to end the “culture of cover-up” of sexual abuse, which has been such a scandal in the Church for so long.

    Two years ago, the whistle-blowing Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò in his August 25, 2018 Testimony, asked a question many were asking: Why did the Church hierarchy do so little to rein in, correct or censure Archbishop, then-Cardinal, Theodore McCarrick? And the archbishop, saying he had informed Pope Francis of the allegations against McCarrick, said Pope Francis had continued the cover-up because he did not wish to take action against a man who had supported his election to the papacy, he called on Francis — rather dramatically — to resign his office.

    Now, with the Report, the Vatican — citing the name “Viganò” more than 300(!) times — has said that Viganò, nuncio in the US after 2011, in 2012 was asked by the Vatican to investigate the charges against McCarrick, and did not carry out such an investigation. The Report is saying, as it were, that “it was Viganò’s fault.”

    I have not yet spoken with Viganò about this specific allegation in the Report, but Viganò did issue a statement characterizing the Report as “Vatican fiction.” (For the moment, there seems to be little more that can be said on this point.)

    The New York Times’ headline proclaimed the blame had been laid by this Report squarely on the shoulders of Pope John Paul II.

    CNN noted John Paul’s acquiescence in the elevation of McCarrick, but mentions that Pope Benedict asked for McCarrick’s resignation in 2005 after “accusations of harassment and abuse towards adults began to surface once again.”

    NBC News trumpeted in its headlines that the “Popes knew of allegations against ex-Cardinal McCarrick years ago” — though, again, what they “knew” was characterized in the report as “rumors.”

    Vatican Communications head Andrea Tornielli points out that such “rumors” were a common way for authorities to smear Church officials falsely in Communist countries like Pope John Paul II’s native Poland.

    The Catholic News Agency chose to spotlight the New Jersey bishops — naming Hughes, Smith and McHugh — and their failure to give full information to inquirers from the Vatican regarding McCarrick’s potential elevation just before 2001. In this sense, those three bishops are blamed by this Report for assisting McCarrick’s rise.

    Tornielli himself, in a piece for Vatican News, took a more hopeful and forward-looking tack: his article was headlined “McCarrick Report: A sorrowful page the Church is learning from.”

    May it be so.

    But do we now truly understand why McCarrick was able to rise to such heights — Archbishop of Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, from 2001 to 2006, and an influential member of the College of Cardinals, which is in a sense the “global Senate” of the global Catholic Church?

    Do we now truly understand who supported and promoted McCarrick, and who warned about his reputation and opposed his rise?

    Do we now truly understand the truth about the “McCarrick case” and, by extension, about how the Church leadership responds to allegations?

    Not yet, it seems. Not yet…