ROCKVILLE CENTRE (NY)
LI Herald
September 6, 2018
By Ben Strack
Diocese looks forward to church’s ‘intense period of reform’
The leader of Long Island’s Catholics recently supported the need to “aggressively uproot this scourge and expression of a culture of death of clergy sexual abuse” following allegations that have reached the Vatican.
Bishop John Barres, head of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, who cited Pope Francis’s letter to Catholics with that message, also called for “decisive answers” in a statement several days after Carlo Maria Vigano, the former top Vatican diplomat in the United States, accused the pope of covering up abuse and called for his resignation.
Vigano, known to be a staunch critic of the pope, claimed in a letter released last week that Francis knew that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians before the information became public, and that the Vatican played a part in covering it up. Vigano claimed that he had informed Francis of McCarrick’s history of abuse in 2013.
The pope accepted McCarrick’s resignation in July after the church deemed credible an accusation that he had sexually abused a minor decades ago.
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