WASHINGTON (DC)
National Catholic Register
May 21, 2019
By Lauretta Brown
In his homily, the successor to Cardinal Donald Wuerl and former cardinal Theodore McCarrick acknowledged that ‘we clerics and hierarchs have irrefutably been the source of the current tempest.’
Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory was installed as the seventh archbishop of Washington Tuesday in a ceremony that comes at a turbulent time for the local Church under the cloud of his predecessors’ sexual abuse and cover-up scandals.
The newly-installed archbishop addressed the issue head-on in his homily, promising those gathered that he would be committed to transparency about his failings.
“I want to be a welcoming shepherd who laughs with you whenever we can, who cries with you whenever we must, and who honestly confesses his faults and failings before you when I commit them, not when they are revealed,” he said to loud applause from those gathered.
Archbishop Gregory’s appointment follows Cardinal Donald Wuerl’s resignation, which was accepted by Pope Francis last year after he came under scrutiny in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report for his handling of sexual abuse allegations when he served as bishop of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2006. Wuerl also faced criticism for initially denying that he knew of any sexual abuse claims against his predecessor Theodore McCarrick before later admitting that he had known of McCarrick’s sexual behavior with seminarians.
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