Catholic church

By now, it’s clear to most American Catholics that our Holy Father just doesn’t like us. While most laypeople assumed his ‘rigidity’ slur was aimed at the legions of young people who are returning to the Latin Mass. Nope: most bishops know he’s talking about the Yanks. He calls the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’s conservative majority, like the saintly and learned Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, right-wing ideologues. His senior advisers accuse Catholic conservatives of engaging in an ‘ecumenism of hate’ with Evangelical Protestants. Sure: Pope Francis cottoned to a few bishops.

Today the Catholic bishops of the United States are in Baltimore to begin their three-day annual general assembly. Security is tight, and protesters are expected outside the conference hotel. Inside, few are making any attempt to pretend that it is business as usual for the Church. Months of scandals have reignited a sexual abuse crisis that many of the bishops hoped they had laid to rest a decade and a half ago. This time, it is the bishops themselves, rather than the rank and file priests, who are in the firing line.

Pope Francis stands accused this morning of covering up the crimes of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, one of the most senior and sinister sex abusers in the history of the Catholic Church. The allegation comes from the Vatican’s former apostolic nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 77, who has called on the Pope to resign. In a devastating 11-page written testament, Viganò says Francis lifted severe sanctions imposed on McCarrick for sexual wrongdoing by Pope Benedict XVI, the existence of which has not been made public until now.

Just before Ireland voted overwhelmingly to end the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Catholics in the fishing village of Clogherhead could be seen storming out of Sunday mass halfway through the service. Why? Their parish priest had come on too strong. He had not only ordered them how to vote but also supplied grisly details of an abortion procedure. Presumably some of them voted to repeal the eighth amendment. The ‘Yes’ campaign couldn’t have won its two-thirds majority without the support of practising Catholics. Very few of these, we can assume, were militantly pro-choice. Instead, they were reassured by promises that any future law would be limited in its impact — and determined to ignore a Catholic hierarchy contaminated by child abuse.