SEOUL (REPUBLIC OF KOREA)
International Policy Digest
August 28, 2018
By Binoy Kampmark
“Now that the corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy, my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths.” – Cardinal Carlo Maria Viganò, Aug 25, 2018
It could be called the apology drive, a journey of institutional contrition. Pope Francis’ Ireland trip has seeped with remarks of forgiveness, seeking understanding from those who found themselves victims of child abuse within the Catholic Church. “We apologise,” he told a church service attended by some hundred thousand at Dublin’s Phoenix Park, “for some members of the hierarchy who did not take care of these painful situations and kept silent.” He “wished to put these crimes before the mercy of the Lord and ask forgiveness for them.”
The Vatican, however, is sibilant with the calls of vipers, and the efforts being made within the organisation to out and implicate Pope Francis as a hypocrite in the business of targeting child abuse found form in Saturday’s note of condemnation by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Viganò had cut his teeth as the Vatican’s ambassador to Washington, and has never warmed to Francis, an official he accused of nursing a “pro-gay ideology” receptive to homosexual clerics.
On Saturday, the National Catholic Register, amongst other sites, ran news of testimony purportedly written by the aggrieved Cardinal. The flashpoint here was the case of former Cardinal and retired archbishop of Washington, D.C., Theodore McCarrick, who now stands as a gruesome personification of institutional climbing and abuse in authority.
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