UNITED STATES
SLATE
August 31, 2018
By Lili Loofbourow
The Catholic Church is exposed. A number of wide-ranging, deeply researched reports of molestation, rape, abuse, corruption, and concealment have been released in close enough time to one another that the magnitude of the horror might actually—for the average American, anyway—sink in. It all feels monumental, if also powered in part by coincidence. The recently published Pennsylvania report, in which a grand jury details the sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by more than 300 priests and systematically argues that church officials were complicit, was two years in the making. It didn’t need to be released two weeks before BuzzFeed published Christine Kenneally’s yearslong investigation into the abuse of children—some of whom didn’t survive—by nuns and priests at St. Joseph’s Catholic orphanage. But it was, and the effects of those stories are stacking up. These two reports came out just three months after every Chilean bishop offered to resign over a massive sex abuse scandal, and a year or so after Netflix documentary series The Keepers revisited an unsolved murder and allegations of abuse in a Baltimore Catholic school. That these are all different—but all cover the same institutional atrocity—is the kind of perfect storm that may get us to focus in ways that the abuse of tens of thousands of children worldwide has not managed to. Humans find numbers like that hard to absorb.
But we respond well to drama, and there are two competing stories right now about the Catholic Church. Call it the people vs. the palace. Alongside this tide of testimony from long-suffering victims and determined investigators, there’s the theater of ex–papal nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò’s “memo” calling for (among other things) the resignation of Pope Francis. Viganò is a hard-line conservative known for helping to arrange Pope Francis’ notorious meeting with anti-gay-marriage activist Kim Davis—which exacerbated tensions Pope Francis and Viganò. (The pope has been generally rather accepting of homosexuality; his U.S. visit included a private audience with a gay man and his partner.) Viganò timed his memo to catch the pope at a strategic weak point. Already reeling from the church scandals, Pope Francis was also visiting Ireland, which recently legalized abortion, indexing a growing distance from the faith. He was vulnerable. If this political maneuvering feels gilded and distasteful, it should. The more you read of the abuses, and of church officials shrugging it off, the less interesting the petty details of Vatican palace intrigue become. Of course the abuse of children would become yet another occasion for liberals and conservatives to plot against each other.
The story of an institution’s rot can be told in many ways: the Boston Globe’s Spotlight coverage (and fictionalized film about same), The Keepers, and the Pennsylvania report all take different, painful, sustained approaches to the problem. As an entry into this grim pantheon, Viganò’s memo constitutes the dullest. While he professes great concern for the church’s victims, his most explosive claim—that Pope Francis knew Cardinal Thomas McCarrick’s problematic record before lifting sanctions imposed on him by Pope Benedict—tellingly mentions only McCarrick’s adult, male victims. (McCarrick, who was accused of harassing seminarians, was accused of abusing two minors as well.) While this doesn’t mean that Viganò doesn’t care about children, neither does it hide his agenda or its attendant slippages: “The seriousness of homosexual behavior must be denounced. The homosexual networks present in the Church must be eradicated.”
There are no good guys here. Francis had already taken the unusual step of demoting the cardinal (who was found to have abused a teenager decades ago), ostensibly to signal how serious he was about rooting out malfeasance, but Viganò contends that he didn’t punish his ally soon enough. Viganò had his own controversy, having been accused of quashing an investigation into an archbishop’s misconduct in Minnesota. He has strongly denied this accusation, but it’s relevant (for reasons of intrigue) that after the New York Times reported the cover-up allegation in 2016, Francis asked that Viganò be investigated. As for Pope Francis, he defended Chilean prelate Juan de la Cruz Barros, naming him bishop of Osorno knowing full well that he had strong ties to Fernando Karadima, Chile’s most notorious predator-priest—this despite testimony from a victim of Karadima’s to the effect that Barros didn’t just know of the abuse but directly witnessed it. “We are used to the blows by the Chilean Catholic hierarchy, but it’s especially hurtful when the slap in the face comes from Pope Francis himself,” said one of Karadima’s accusers. “We hoped he was different.”
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