When the world’s cardinals met in Rome last Monday for the first of their crucial pre-conclave discussions, they raised ‘the issue of clerical abuse’, according to a Vatican spokesman.
The cardinals are forbidden to reveal anything that was said.
But behind closed doors, the preparations for the conclave – which starts on Wednesday – are already mired in scandal.
Aside from doubts about the true age of Philippe Ouedraogo, a cardinal from Burkina Faso whom some claim is 80, meaning he’s too old to vote, and concerns about the presence of the Peruvian cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, who faces sexual abuse allegations (which he denies), several cardinals have torn into the legacy of the late Pope Francis.
‘We have listened to many complaints against Francis’s papacy in these days’, one unnamed cardinal told America Magazine, a Jesuit publication.
In any case, we can be certain that Monday’s debate was haunted by a series of jaw-dropping scandals whose details are unknown to the vast majority of the 400,000 Catholics who attended Pope Francis’s funeral a week ago.
If they had known, the crowds would have been much smaller.
For the common denominator of these scandals – whose victims included 20 Slovenian nuns who claim to have been raped, Argentinian seminarians grotesquely assaulted by their bishop and a Belgian teenager subjected to incestuous assault by his uncle, a bishop – is that Francis went to bizarre lengths either to conceal or excuse these crimes.
The ‘people’s Pope’ was elected in 2013 on a promise to hold the Church accountable for clerical sex abuse.
And it’s true that he did establish new rules designed to punish bishops found guilty.
But the first Argentinian pontiff did not practise what he preached.
The darkest mystery of Francis’s 12-year reign was his persistent habit of shielding credibly accused and even convicted sexual predators from justice.
The Pope enjoys supreme authority over the Catholic Church.
He can twist or ignore canon law, which is supposed to punish sex offenders, and the Vatican state’s criminal law, without being challenged.
That is precisely what he did, again and again.
Indeed, his sinister modus operandi predated his election: as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he tried to keep a priest who abused homeless boys out of jail.
Hellbound and Down 