NEW YORK (NY)
Commonweal Magazine
August 27, 2018
By Paul Moses
What Matters Most in the Viganò Letter
Much of the coverage of the letter from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò concerning the cover-up of sexual misconduct allegations against Theodore McCarrick is focusing on Pope Francis’s potential role in it. That’s just the spin Viganò and conservative critics of the pope were hoping for. But in looking more closely at everything that Viganò alleges, Francis’s immediate predecessors don’t fare very well either: he depicts John Paul II as at best oblivious to the facts of the McCarrick case because of health reasons, and Benedict XVI as so ineffectual that the Curia didn’t bother enforcing the restrictions he allegedly placed on the cardinal.
Viganò’s charge against Pope Francis is not that he created the problem but that he failed to clean it up once he knew. Keep in mind, though, that McCarrick’s situation was one strand in a complex web of curial deceit that Francis inherited when he became pope. Many of the same people now seizing on Viganò’s claims against Francis had criticized the pope for being unfair, in their view, to curial officials his predecessors appointed.
Francis told the Curia about its fifteen “diseases” in a pre-Christmas greeting in 2014, a diagnosis that included “spiritual Alzheimer’s disease,” “rivalry and vainglory,” gossip and back-biting, hoarding material goods, and “the disease of persons who insatiably try to accumulate power and to this end are ready to slander, defame and discredit others, even in newspapers and magazines.” The problem with Francis has not been the diagnosis, but following through on a treatment plan.
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