WASHINGTON (DC)
The Weekly Standard
September 8, 2018
By Mark Heminway
Conservatives pounce, the media fiddles.
In 2016, after the film Spotlight—which portrayed a group of Boston Globe reporters who uncover a sex-abuse scandal covered-up by the Catholic Church—won the Academy Award for best picture, a cultural commentator praised the movie on the Vatican website. The Globe reporters, wrote Luca Pellegrini, “made themselves examples of their most pure vocation, that of finding the facts, verifying sources, and making themselves—for the good of the community and of a city—paladins of the need for justice.”
Two years later, as a far worse abuse scandal unfolds in the church—a scandal that may involve the pope himself—the Vatican is silent and the paladins of the news media seem eager to ignore the whole thing.
Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington, D.C., is alleged to have been for decades a serial sexual abuser of teenage seminarians. On August 25, Carlo Maria Viganò, the former apostolic nuncio (or Vatican ambassador) to the United States, published an 11-page letter alleging that McCarrick’s abuse was known by church authorities from Donald Wuerl, the present archbishop of Washington D.C., to the highest reaches of the Vatican, and, further, that Pope Benedict XVI made attempts to sanction McCarrick by restricting his travel and forbidding him to say Mass in public. Viganò wrote that, after succeeding Benedict, Francis not only overturned this punishment but elevated McCarrick in the church hierarchy.
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