IT'S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME

Yesterday, Catholic News Service published a redacted version of a letter which appears to confirm the details offered by Archbishop Vigano, former Apostolic Nuncio to the US from 2011 to 2016.

The letter, dated October 11, 2006, acknowledging that  the Vatican Secretariat of State received allegations made against then-Cardinal McCarrick, is from then-Archbishop Leonardo Sandri, who was Substitute of the Secretariat of State, to Father Boniface Ramsey, who had been on the faculty of Immaculate Conception Seminary in South Orange, N.J., from 1986 to 1996.

Sandri's letter refers “to the serious matters involving some of the students of the Immaculate Conception Seminary, which in November 2000 you were good enough to bring confidentially to the attention of the then Apostolic Nuncio in the United States, the late Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo.”

Father Ramsey has stated repeatedly that when McCarrick was appointed Archbishop of Washington in 2000, he contacted Archbishop Montalvo to report allegations of McCarrick’s misconduct with seminarians he had heard from his own seminary students.

At Archbishop Montalvo’s request, he said, he put his concerns in writing.

Fr. Ramsey stated that in his letter, “I complained about McCarrick’s relationships with seminarians and the whole business with sleeping with seminarians.  “My letter [of] November 22, 2000, was about McCarrick and it wasn’t accusing seminarians of anything; it was accusing McCarrick,” he said.

Although Father Ramsey did not receive a formal response to his letter of Nov. 22, 2000,  he stated that “he was certain the letter had been received because of the note he got from then-Archbishop Sandri in 2006 acknowledging the allegations he had raised in 2000.”

The immediate purpose of Sandri's 2006 letter was to inquire about a priest of the Archdiocese of Newark who had studied at Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University. The priest was being considered for a post at the Vatican.

Now-Cardinal Sandri is Prefect of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches.

In his explosive letter written as Pope Francis was concluding his visit to Ireland, Archbishop Viganò had written that Montalvo (and his successor, Archbishop Pietro Sambi) “did not fail to inform the Holy See immediately, as soon as they learned of Archbishop McCarrick’s gravely immoral behavior with seminarians and priests. Indeed, according to what Nuncio Pietro Sambi wrote, Father Boniface Ramsey, O.P.’s letter, dated November 22, 2000, was written at the request of the late Nuncio Montalvo. In the letter, Father Ramsey, who had been a professor at the diocesan seminary in Newark from the end of the ’80s until 1996, affirms that there was a recurring rumor in the seminary that the Archbishop 'shared his bed with seminarians,' inviting five at a time to spend the weekend with him at his beach house. And he added that he knew a certain number of seminarians, some of whom were later ordained priests for the Archdiocese of Newark, who had been invited to this beach house and had shared a bed with the Archbishop.”

The letter published yesterday by Catholic News Service confirms every part of Archbishop Vigano’s testimony related to the knowledge the Holy See had available concerning the perverse deeds of McCarrick.

What other documentary evidence will be brought to light confirming the entirety of Archbishop Vigano’s allegations remains to be disclosed?

Undoubtedly, this latest revelation will add further fuel to the calls for all those involved to tell what they knew, as well as when they knew it.

Resignations from office will follow.  

It’s only a matter of time and the patience of the Catholic faithful that already has worn paper thin.