LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times
September 13, 2018
By The Times Editorial Board
For almost a generation, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and worldwide has been shaken by revelations that a significant number of priests had sexually abused young people — and that church leaders not only conspired to conceal their crimes, but often also allowed them to continue to have contact with children, sometimes on the mistaken assumption that they had been “cured.”
But lately the anxiety among the faithful over decades of denial and deceit has reached a crisis point. It now threatens to tarnish the reformist papacy of Pope Francis.
The pope himself has been accused by a retired Vatican diplomat, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, of reactivating a sidelined former U.S. cardinal despite being told that the prelate had sexually harassed seminarians. Meanwhile, the American church has been dealing with the aftershocks of a grand jury report in Pennsylvania that identified 301 “predator priests” who abused more than 1,000 children in six of the state’s eight dioceses over a period of 70 years. The report has led to calls for the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., who was faulted in the report for decisions he made as bishop of Pittsburgh. Wuerl has said he will meet with the pope soon to ask Francis to accept his resignation.
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