“The Pope has a bigger agenda,” said Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, in an interview about bombshell allegations about sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. “He’s got to get on with other things of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church. We’re not going to go down a rabbit hole on this.”
And in that quote, which Cupich has protested was taken out of context (it wasn’t), Cupich showed a sad reality, which is that the Catholic Church is the latest in a long line of exceptional institutions of Western civilization brought into deep decline by the infiltration of the cultural Marxist/postmodern Left.
The “rabbit hole” Cupich refers to is a testimony released Saturday by Archbishop Carlo Viganò[1], a distinguished Vatican veteran who had served as the papal nuncio, or ambassador, to the United States, which included a scathing critique of Pope Francis. The most high-profile item in the 11-page Viganò letter was his story about Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, who had been the head of the Catholic archdiocese in Washington, D.C. McCarrick, it’s alleged, engaged in the sexual harassment and abuse of seminary students and also minors in his charge — and when Francis’s predecessor Pope Benedict, whose record in putting a stop to clerical abuse in the Church was sadly not the best, found out about McCarrick’s behavior he ordered McCarrick out of the seminary where he was living, restricted him to private prayer and penance, and demanded McCarrick avoid public life in the church. That was sometime around 2010.
But when Francis succeeded Benedict, he set McCarrick free from those sanctions and allowed him to resume a place of prominence in the Church. This while McCarrick was continuing a pattern of activity [2]which can
