UNITED STATES
The Blaze
Stephen Herreid
This week the Vatican announced the creation of a new tribunal to hold bishops accountable for sex abuse cover-ups. A Vatican spokesman echoed the pleas of many victim advocates when he went beyond the topic of individual predator priests and singled out negligent bishops.
“This is another kind of responsibility and shortcoming, and has to be judged in an appropriate way with appropriate rules,” he said.
While conservatives may have serious qualms with Pope Francis, his handling of sex-abuse cover-ups provides an opportunity to practice humility when seeming ideological allies are implicated. This week’s tribunal announcement should remind us of earlier actions the pope has taken to combat cover-ups. Embarrassingly, not all of us have welcomed his efforts.
Last February, hundreds of priests rustled into the Paul VI Audience Hall for a meeting with Pope Francis. Some of them, dressed in the now-rare black cassocks that were once commonplace before the Second Vatican Council, must have shifted in their seats as the Holy Father delivered his remarks. The word “traditionalist” echoed through the hall several times, and it sounded almost derogatory coming from the progressive pope.
Zenit News reports:
[Pope Francis] referred to the case of some bishops who accepted “traditionalist” seminarians who were kicked out of other dioceses, without finding out information on them, because “they presented themselves very well, very devout.” They were then ordained, but these were later revealed to have “psychological and moral problems.” … It is not a practice, but it “happens often” in these environments, the Pope stressed, and to ordain these types of seminarians is like placing a “mortgage on the Church.”
The Holy Father did not specify which cases he was referring to, but some of the priests in his audience could guess: Recent headlines tell the story of Father Carlos Urrutigoity of the Diocese of Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, where Pope Francis recently removed a traditionalist bishop who had accepted and even promoted Urrutigoity, despite the priest’s long and gruesome reputation as a sociopathic homosexual predator.
Carlos Urrutigoity’s “Intimate Acquaintances”
Shortly before landing in Paraguay, Urrutigoity escaped prosecution for molesting a minor in the U.S. (thanks to Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations). “John Doe,” the minor who came forward, was a student at St. Gregory’s Academy in Elmhurst, Pennsylcvania, where Urrutigoity served as a chaplain.
St. Gregory’s Academy was a tiny, experimental school run by Catholics devoted to the traditional Latin Mass, who barred their students from TV, CD’s, and cell phones in an attempt to shield them from the decadence of modern popular culture.
But according to whistleblowers and sworn testimonies, this “experiment in tradition” went horribly wrong: Heavy underage drinking, bed-sharing, and group nudity were standard occurrences among students, and the Academy’s close, unwholesome atmosphere provided an easy playing field for Urrutigoity’s methods of manipulation and seduction, which included plying students with alcohol and tobacco, and convincing them to sleep in his bed as part of their “spiritual direction.”
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