THE MCCARRICK SCANDAL RAISES SERIOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CULTURE OF SILENCE WITHIN THE CHURCH

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the Honduran deputy to Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, who is one of the Pope’s top advisers. 

Auxiliary Bishop Juan Jose Pineda Fasquelle was accused of sexual misconduct with seminarians and lavish spending on gay lovers.

But that is only part of this story.

Perhaps what needs further investigation is what Cardinal Maradiaga knew of Bishop Pineda’s misdeeds and the reasons why he may have tolerated the antics of such a sexually active gay Bishop under his immediate supervision.

The scandal involving Cardinal Theodore McCarrick raises the same questions.

According to Priests who have been quoted in the secular press, it was an “open secret” that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians to his beach house and molested them.

How is it possible there could have been such a deafening silence from those who knew, especially among the ranks of fellow-Bishops?

As I have been predicting, the McCarrick scandal will be a turning point in this sordid chapter in the history of the Church..

I expect that pressure will be brought to bear upon the Holy Father to expel McCarrick from the College of Cardinals.  

Thus far, the Holy Father has only ordered that the Cardinal be removed from public ministry, pending a full investigation into the “credible” allegation that he sexually assaulted a teenager while a Priest in New York.

But it was only after the Pope issued his decree that the Dioceses of Newark and Metuchen, New Jersey, simultaneously revealed that they had received three complaints of misconduct by McCarrick against adults who became Priests.  The Dioceses settled suits brought against them by two of McCarrick’s victims.

Why only then?

Additional victims of McCarrick’s deviant behavior have started to come forward to tell the horror stories of their abuse at the hands of the disgraced Cardinal.

McCarrick was protected and promoted because there exists in the Church a culture of silence and corruption previously inconceivable in the minds of Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

The revelation of this corruption has now reached into the once-sacrosanct College of Cardinals itself.

One can only imagine the depth to which the confidence, trust and respect of the Catholic faithful has collapsed due to these awful tales of perversion and cover up.

The Church has lost its moral voice and the world is being deprived of the Gospel counsels on account of these scandals.

Pope Francis must respond.  He must do so quickly.  He must do so justly.  He must do so articulating both the outrage and suffering of the victims and the absolute commitment of the Church to root out of the Clerical ranks not only the abusers themselves but those who enabled them and abetted them by their silence.

McCarrick must be removed from the College, perhaps even laicized for the grave scandal he has brought to the Church.  

So must other Bishops guilty of the same deviances.  

But so must their protectors and abettors.

Justice to the mission of the Church, to the victims, the millions of Catholic faithful and to the Gospel itself demands this.

Thus, far the response of the Holy Father has been woefully inadequate and dreadfully lacking.