Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl as archbishop of Washington, D.C., the Vatican said on Friday, making him one of the most senior Catholic figures to step down in a worldwide sexual abuse crisis.

Wuerl, 77, who was bishop of Pittsburgh between 1988 and 2006, has been under scrutiny over his handling of sexual abuse cases during that period. He keeps the title of cardinal.

In a letter by the pope released in Washington, Francis indicated that he accepted the resignation reluctantly and at Wuerl’s insistence. He asked Wuerl to stay on as administrator until another archbishop could be appointed.

Wuerl has been under fire since the release in August of a U.S. Grand Jury report on sexual abuse found evidence that at least 1,000 people, mostly children, had been sexually abused by some 300 clergymen over the course of 70 years. The report covered six dioceses in Pennsylvania, including Pittsburgh when it was led by Wuerl.

He has also been accused of knowing about sexual misconduct by his predecessor in Washington, ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

Wuerl has defended his overall record in Pittsburgh. He also has denied knowing that McCarrick, once one of the U.S. Church’s most prominent figures, had forced male adult seminarians to have sex with him years ago.

In July McCarrick became the first cardinal in about 100 years to be stripped of his red hat and title of “eminence”.

Francis ordered McCarrick to retire to a life of prayer and penitence after American Church officials said as part of a separate investigation that allegations that McCarrick had sexually abused a 16-year-old boy almost 50 years ago were credible and substantiated.

(REUTERS)

Prominent German magazine Der Spiegel has published a 19-page report criticising Pope Francis’s leadership of the Catholic Church and accusing him of ignoring abuse survivors in Argentina. Their cover story, titled “Thou shalt not lie” and subtitled “The silence of the shepherds”, attacks the Pope’s handling of the abuse crisis and his attempted Church reforms.

“Pope Francis promised when he took office a renewed, cosmopolitan Catholicism,” the magazine says. “Five-and-a-half years and many abuse cases later, the Universal Church is divided as never before.”

The magazine, which is generally regarded as left-liberal, is considered one of the most influential in Europe.

According to LifeSiteNews, its report covers cases such as that of Fr Inzoli, a convicted abuser laicised by Benedict XVI but restored to the priestly state by Pope Francis. Francis later laicised him again. It also examines the ongoing McCarrick scandal, and the members of the C9 council of cardinals who have faced allegations of covering up abuse.

On his handling of issues such as Communion for Protestant spouses and Communion for the divorced and remarried, De Spiegel says the Pope may “go down in history as the one who split the Church”.

The report most notably includes an interview with an abuse survivor from Argentina who says she was one of a group of victims who wrote to Francis shortly after his election, but never received a reply.

The woman, Julieta Añazco, says she was sexually abused by a priest when she was seven years old. She said that in 2013, shortly after Pope Francis was elected, she and 13 other victims wrote to him to describing what had happened.

They sent the letter by recorded delivery and, three weeks later, received a confirmation of receipt. However, they never received a reply.

The accused priest was subsequently transferred to a nursing home where he “continues to celebrate Mass”.

“During Bergoglio’s time as cardinal, many of the abuse victims in Buenos Aires had turned to him for help; nobody was permitted access to him,” the magazine says, adding that there are currently 62 trials in process against Argentine priests. “The number of their victims could be in the thousands.”

A legal defender for Argentine abuse survivors, Juan Pablo Gallego, says that Pope Francis is “now in exile in Rome – has found his refuge there, so to speak”. Gallego adds that in Argentina Francis faces “the suspicion that he protected for years rapists and abusers of children.”

He cites the example of Fr Julio César Grassi, who is now in prison for raping teenage boys. Francis had been Grassi’s confessor and ordered a legal report to defend Grassi against the charges.

Gallego says that in 2006 he had a conversation with the then Cardinal Bergoglio. “He was withdrawn and mistrusting, he said no word about the fact that the Church paid Grassi’s lawyers. The current image of an open, sympathetic Pope Francis does not fit the man whom I sat in front of at the time.”

Source: Catholic Herald

Pope Francis has removed a Chilean priest under investigation in a case involving the sexual abuse of children.

The Archdiocese of Santiago said the Pope had decided to defrock Reverend Cristian Precht, local daily El Mercurio reported on Saturday.

Precht was a former head of the Church’s Vicariate of Solidarity human rights group, which in the 1980s challenged ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet to end the practice of torture in Chile.

The Chilean religious leader has since been accused of sexual abuse as part of an investigation into allegations against members of the Marist Brothers religious community.

Precht has previously denied the charges.

The Catholic Church worldwide is reeling from crises involving the sexual abuse of minors, deeply damaging confidence in the Holy See.

The scandals have been the most serious in Chile, the United States, Australia, and Ireland.

Chile’s Santiago Archbishop

Cases of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests have led to many investigations, trials, and convictions.

There have been numerous allegations of attempts by Church authorities to cover up abuse.

Pope Francis has formerly expressed “shame and sorrow” over the matter.

Addressing an event in Ireland, attended by some victims of such sexual abuses, the pontiff admitted that the Church had failed to address the “crimes.”

Pope Francis has said he has a zero tolerance policy toward the sexual abuse of minors in the Church, but he has also been accused of ignoring warnings on the matter.

The former Vatican ambassador to the United States, who called on Pope Francis to resign over allegations that he was covering-up child abuse by priests, says corruption has reached the top levels of the Church hierarchy.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who has gone into hiding over fears for his safety since his 11-page testament released over the weekend, told an Italian journalist that he did not act out of anger or revenge.

“I spoke out because by now the corruption has arrived at the top of the church hierarchy,” Archbishop Vigano was quoted as saying.

The 77-year-old papal ambassador, who is known for his conservative views, said that he has “never had feelings of vendetta and rancor in all these years.”

Vigano also said that he was “serene and at peace” after publishing the letter, but saddened by what he described as subsequent attempts to undermine his credibility.

He claimed there was a “conspiracy of silence not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia.”

In the letter published on Sunday, Vigano accused Pope Francis of having known for years about the sexual misconduct by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, but preferred to ignore those allegations and instead rehabilitated him as a powerful figure in the American church.

Vigano accused a long list of current and past Vatican and US Church officials of covering up the case of Cardinal McCarrick, who was forced to resign last month.

Pope has declined to respond to the allegations.

Where is Vigano?

The Italian journalist Aldo Maria Valli, via whom Vigano has been communicating, said that the archbishop had “purchased an aeroplane ticket.”

Recounting a meeting with Vigano, Valli said the archbishop told him he would leave the country.

“He cannot tell me where he is going. I am not to look for him. His old mobile phone number will no longer work. We say goodbye for the last time,” Valli said.

Vigano said in the letter that he was being punished for uncovering corruption in the Vatican.

He wrote that Pope Francis and his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI were aware of sexual abuse by McCarrick, who led churches in the Washington region from 2001 to 2006.

The letter has prompted reaction from within the Catholic community. The church’s conservatives, who regard the Pope as unsuitably liberal, called for a full investigation into Vigano’s allegations.

The Pope was in Ireland when the letter was released on Sunday. During his 36-hour visit to the country, he apologized to people in Ireland and “begged for God’s forgiveness” for several abuse scandals within the Irish church over many decades.

If proven, the allegations would be extremely damaging to the reputation of Pope Francis and the Vatican, which has already come under pressure since the pontiff prompted international outrage in January by defending a controversial bishop accused of covering up sexual abuse by a fellow Chilean priest.

The Vatican was rocked this month by a devastating US report into child sex scandal that accused more than 300 priests in the state of Pennsylvania of abusing more than 1,000 children since the 1950s.

Source: Presstv

During the night between August 25 and 26, while Pope Francis was resting in Dublin, the newspaper “La Verità” in Italian, “The National Catholic Register” and  “Lifesite News”  in English, and “InfoVaticana” in Spanish published – respectively introduced by Marco Tosatti, Edward Pentin, Diane Montagna, and Gabriel Ariza – the stunning accusation by the former apostolic nuncio in the United States, Carlo Maria Viganò, against those at the highest levels of the Church, starting with the pope himself, who knew for some time about the scandalous homosexual activity of the no-longer-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, but in spite of this did nothing about it.

Viganò was the Holy See’s ambassador in Washington from 2011 to 2016, after having been from 1998 to 2009 a delegate in Rome for the pontifical embassies, with the faculty of overseeing the personal dossiers of candidates for the episcopacy. And he had proof that as of 2000 the Vatican authorities had been informed by the nunciature in the United States of McCarrick’s immoral conduct, without this hindering his promotion as archbishop of Washington and as cardinal.

In 2006, it was Viganò himself who sent the secretary of state at the time, Tarcisio Bertone, a dossier against McCarrick compiled over the previous years by the nuncios in the United States at the time, Gabriel Montalvo and Pietro Sambi. And he did the same in 2008, forwarding to the highest Vatican authorities a report redacted by one of the most assiduous investigators of sexual abuse in the States, Richard Sipe.

In both cases, he received no reply. But when the information reached, by means unknown, Benedict XVI himself, there was an effect. Between 2009 and 2010 McCarrick was subjected – Viganò writes – to the following sanctions:

“The Cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance.”

The sanctions were communicated to McCarrick by then-nuncio Sambi. But they were never put into practice, with the full support of the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who continued to host the reprobate at the seminary of his diocese and to treat him with full honors, only to declare now that he never knew anything about his misconduct.

Then, in 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope, and on June 23 he received Viganò in audience, after he had become nuncio in the United States. Who today reports as follows the words he said and the pope’s reaction:

“Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.’ The Pope did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time, and he immediately changed the subject.”

The fact is that Francis not only did not require McCarrick to submit to the sanctions that had been imposed on him by Benedict XVI, but he kept him close until a few weeks ago as his chief adviser in the key appointments that are reshaping the Catholic hierarchy in the United States, promoting his proteges. “It was only when he was forced by the report of the abuse of a minor,”  Viganò writes, “that he took action [regarding McCarrick].”

But in the judgment of the former nuncio in the United States, for Pope Francis the case could not be seen as closed. Viganò writes at the culminating point of his indictment:

“Francis is abdicating the mandate which Christ gave to Peter to confirm the brethren. Indeed, by his action he has divided them, led them into error, and encouraged the wolves to continue to tear apart the sheep of Christ’s flock. In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them.”

Viganò’s “Testimony” is highly substantiated and charges other important cardinals, from Pietro Parolin to Sean Patrick O’Mallet to Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga. It is absolutely a must-read, in its entirety.

Source: L’Espresso

Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has used the first papal visit to Ireland in 39 years to demand action by the Roman Catholic Church to address the systemic cover-up of child abuse by persists and church institutions.

An Alitalia flight carrying Pope Francis, his entourage and the Vatican media corps touched down at Dublin airport on Saturday morning for a brief visit to Ireland, a country that has been devastated by clerical abuse.

“Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, industrial schools, illegal adoptions and clerical child abuse are stains on our state, our society and also the Catholic Church. Wounds are still open and there is much to be done to bring about justice and truth and healing for victims and survivors,” Varadkar told a state reception attended by the Pope.

“Holy Father, I ask that you use your office and influence to ensure this is done here in Ireland and across the world … We must now ensure that from words flow actions.”

The Catholic Church faces its worst credibility crisis in years. Scandals in Ireland, Australia, Chile and the United States have put pressure on the Pope to more fully address the issue of child sex abuse.

‘Repugnant’ abuses a source of shame for church 

Addressing the reception attended by some abuse survivors, Pope Francis acknowledged that the failure of Church authorities to address “repugnant” clerical abuses was a source of shame for the Catholic community.

“I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the Church charged with responsibility for their protection and education,” he said.

“The failure of ecclesiastical authorities – bishops, religious superiors, priests and others – adequately to address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community.”

The number of people turning out for the Papal visit is expected to be about a quarter of the 2.7 million who greeted John Paul II in 1979, indicating how the country has changed since abuse cases came to light in the 1990s.

In 1979, contraception, homosexuality, divorce and abortion were illegal in Ireland, and more than nine in 10 people attended mass each week.

Those pillars of Catholic teaching have been overturned, with voters approving abortion and gay marriage in referendums over the past three years. Mass attendance is also now well below 10 percent in some Dublin parishes.

The papal visit coincides with the 2018 World Meeting of Families (WMOF) — a global Catholic gathering that takes place every three years.

Pope Francis is also set to attend an outdoor mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on Sunday.

The latest revelation of widespread child sexual abuse by US Catholic clergy has given impetus to efforts by legislators, including a Pennsylvania lawmaker who has said he was raped by a priest as a child, to make it easier to prosecute such cases.

Pennsylvania State Representative Mark Rozzi, 47, said he has fought for years to give people who say they were sexually assaulted as children more time to report such crimes to police in Pennsylvania, one of 14 US states considering bills to extend the statute of limitations for such offenses.

“We’re going to get what the victims want,” Rozzi said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, a day after a grand jury found that about 300 priests had sexually abused about 1,000 children over the past 70 years in Pennsylvania.

“You either support victims or you support pedophiles,” Rozzi said.

The grand jury report was the latest revelation in a scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church since the Boston Globe in 2002 reported that priests had preyed on young boys and girls and that church leaders had covered it up.

Similar reports have emerged in Europe, Australia and Chile, prompting lawsuits, sending dioceses into bankruptcy and undercutting the moral authority of the leadership of the Church, which has some 1.2 billion members around the world.

A statute of limitations is a law requiring that prosecutors bring a criminal case within a certain time frame. The advocacy group Child USA said such statutes can block justice as children may not realize they were victims of sex crimes for decades.

Amy Hill, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, the bishops’ political arm in the state, declined on Wednesday to say whether bishops supported or opposed eliminating statutes of limitations.

“The time to discuss legislation will come later,” she said. “Our focus now is on improving ways that survivors and their families can recover.”

In the past, the group had spoken out against the idea. The national bishops’ conference did not respond to a request for comment.

Some 41 states have eliminated statutes of limitations for criminally prosecuting child sex abuse. Earlier this year, Michigan and Hawaii passed laws giving victims more time to report sexual assaults on children.

Pennsylvania was one of the first US states to raise the age for reporting child sexual abuse. In 2002 it lifted the age to 30 from 23 and five years later raised it to age 50.

State legislators are ready to take up Rozzi’s bill eliminating the limit, said Steve Miskin, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Representative Dave Reed. “It’s definitely something that he’s looking to bring up sooner than later,” Miskin said.

Tuesday’s report could help push through bills in states from California to New Hampshire that would relax the limits for criminal or civil action on sexual assaults on children, said Marci Hamilton, chief executive of the advocacy group Child USA.

Sexual abuse of children extends far beyond the Catholic Church, with teachers and sports coaches also facing accusations.

Given that child abusers in positions of power can continue to assault children for decades, making it easier to prosecute them could prevent future abuse if abusers are imprisoned or lose their positions, Hamilton said in a telephone interview.

“What we want to do is to find out who the hidden child predators are,” said Hamilton, who is also a professor of religion and law at the University of Pennsylvania.

Costs related to such cases have taken a heavy toll on church coffers, reaching nearly $600 million since July 2013, according to a May report by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

US church leaders have said that they have implemented extensive new measures to prevent the sexual abuse of children by clergy.

(Source: Reuters)

Escalating violence in Cameroon, including graphic violence against women and children, has drawn condemnation from the World Council of Churches (WCC).

“The World Council of Churches condemns all forms of violence in Cameroon and calls on the government to stop using any force to punish its people in the English-speaking region of Cameroon,” said Prof. Dr Isabel Apawo Phiri, WCC acting general secretary, commenting on the current cycle of violence in the Central African country.

“Cameroon authorities must immediately cease the use of disproportionate and deadly force against civilians and protect the human rights of all,” she added.

The incidents are part of increasing violence against civilians in Cameroon, where, in the last three years, the Cameroonian military has been waging a multifront war against Anglophone separatists, especially in the western part of the country, and against Boko Haram in the north.

Phiri also called for prayers for peace in Cameroon and reaffirmed the WCC’s solidarity with the estimated 160,000 civilians who have been displaced by the fighting.

In recent weeks, a video that appears to show Cameroonian soldiers in the Mayo-Tsanaga region executing two women, a young girl and a baby was widely circulated on social media, bringing to light one of the atrocious aspects of the conflict. Another video was broadcast in June showing soldiers wearing Cameroonian uniforms setting fire to two houses in a village located in the English-speaking region of the country.

The government of Cameroon initially denounced the Mayo-Tsanaga video as “fake news” but has since announced a formal investigation and arrested four soldiers.

Phiri also noted the severe gender injustice going on in Cameroon. “As in most conflict situations worldwide, violence disproportionally affects women, who become especially vulnerable when law and order break down,” she said.

The Presbyterian Church in Cameroon in July organized a “Week of Prayer for Cameroon in Times of Crisis,” calling for repentance, a cease fire and a peace plan. The World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) is planning a solidarity visit to Cameroon.

There is growing concern that upcoming presidential elections, scheduled for 7 October, will lead to further intensification and militarization of the conflict in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions. President Paul Biya has been in power since 1982 and announced on 13 July that he will be running for a seventh term.

Source: WCC

An Australian archbishop convicted of concealing abuse by a notorious pedophile priest in the 1970s says he hopes his stepping down would be a “catalyst to heal pain and distress” after his resignation was accepted by Pope Francis.

The Vatican announced on Monday the departure of Philip Wilson, sentenced to a year in detention earlier this month, after becoming one of the highest-ranking church officials to be convicted on the charge in May.

Wilson was found guilty in an Australian court of failing to report allegations against pedophile priest Jim Fletcher.

He submitted his resignation, which he says was not requested by the Vatican, on July 20, a day after Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called on the Pope to sack the 67-year-old.

In a statement released by the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide on Monday, Wilson said, “I made this decision because I have become increasingly worried at the growing level of hurt that my recent conviction has caused within the community.”

Turnbull welcomed the resignation in a statement to Fairfax Media on Monday, adding that “there is no more important responsibility for community and church leaders than the protection of children.”

Wilson had long denied the charges and initially resisted calls to resign pending an appeal against his conviction.

His legal team made four attempts to have the case thrown out, arguing that their client suffered from Alzheimer’s and should therefore avoid trial.

But a magistrate in Australia found Wilson guilty of concealing a serious indictable offence of another person, concluding that his primary motive was to protect the church.

He said when sentencing him Wilson had showed “no remorse or contrition.”

The court has adjourned the matter until August 14 to assess whether Wilson can serve his sentence under home detention.

Wilson’s conviction comes amid a host of accusations that the Catholic Church ignored and covered up child abuse in Australia, charges that have also plagued other countries.

Over five years of investigations, the royal commission spoke to thousands of victims and heard claims of abuse, involving churches, orphanages, sporting clubs, youth groups and schools.

Wilson’s departure comes just two days after the Pope accepted the resignation of US cardinal Theodore McCarrick, 88, accused of sexually abusing a teenager while working as a priest in New York in the early 1970s.

McCarrick is just the second cardinal ever to lose his status. He remains a priest pending the Vatican investigative process.

Last month, Francis accepted the resignation of five Chilean bishops amid accusations of abuse and related cover-ups.

(Source: AFP)

The Government of Ghana has promised to help return the body of the late Ghanaian missionary who was gruesomely killed in Cameroon .

This follows complaints by the family of the 28-year old missionary to the effect that the government had ignored their calls for help.

The deceased, Apostle Isaac Attoh, who is survived by a young widow and a two-month old baby boy was shot dead in the troubled town of Batibo in Cameroon.

The deceased was dressed with his clerical when he was killed.

Observers have condemned the death of the pastor, but the church in Cameroon is yet to make an official intervention.

Unconfirmed reports say Attoh was killed alongside two other Ghanaians who are yet to be identified.

Efforts by some stranded Ghanaian pastors and friends in Cameroon to retrieve the body of the deceased had proven futile, as the military was unwilling to release the body to anyone.

The late Isaac Attoh, the third of four siblings is survived by his wife and a 2-month-old baby boy.

His family had earlier urged the Ghanaian government and the International community to intervene and get his remains ferried to Ghana for burial.

It is unclear why the pastor will be shot, but there is currently a fast-escalating chaos in Cameroon after some activists began peaceful protests to request that English language be used in the courtrooms and public schools of the country’s two anglophone regions including Bamenda.

Dozens of people have so far died, with hundreds imprisoned, and thousands escaping across the border to Nigeria as a result of the situation.

If the situation is not defused through dialogue, the entire country could be destabilised ahead of elections in the autumn, according to the International Crisis Group.

Source: Modern Ghana