The Vatican Shows an Overdue Decisiveness on Sexual Abuse

By Erasmus
The Economist
July 31, 2018

https://www.economist.com/erasmus/2018/07/31/the-vatican-shows-an-overdue-decisiveness-on-sexual-abuse

TWICE in the past few days, Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of senior prelates who were embroiled in abuse scandals. The latest was Australia’s Archbishop Philip Wilson, who had received a criminal conviction for covering up serial abuse by a priest. There had been widespread calls for him to step down, including from Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister. He submitted his resignation on July 20th, but only on July 30th did the pontiff publicly accept it. Mr Turnbull was among many Australians who called the pope’s actions welcome but overdue.

Two days earlier, on July 28th, the Vatican announced that the pope had accepted Theodore McCarrick’s resignation from the status of cardinal. Mr McCarrick, an archbishop emeritus of Washington, DC, was for decades one of the most prominent figures in Catholic America. The news came a month after the archdiocese of New York said it considered “credible and substantiated” an allegation of sexual misdeeds involving a teenager, said to have been perpetrated by the cleric in 1971 and 1972. Now aged 88, he said he has no recollection of the alleged incidents.