Pope Francis Calls Clerical Sex Abuse an ‘Urgent’ Challenge for the Church by Thomas D Williams, Ph. D. for Breitbart
GNN Note – Sorry Mr. Pope, but it’s been an “urgent” issue for multiple decades, it didn’t just start this past week. Please don’t insult our intelligence with this rhetoric.
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ROME – Pope Francis has asked Catholics to pray for an upcoming Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse, saying he intended to convoke the meeting as an act of “forceful pastoral responsibility.”
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“From next Thursday to Sunday, there will take place in the Vatican a meeting with the presidents of all the bishops’ conferences on the matter of the protection of minors in the Church,” the pope told the crowds gathered in Saint Peter’s Square Sunday for his weekly Angelus prayer. “I invite prayers for this appointment that I have wished as an act of forceful pastoral responsibility in the face of an urgent challenge in our time.”
On Saturday, the Vatican announced that former-cardinal Theodore McCarrick would be laicized after being found guilty of serial homosexual abuse.
According to a Vatican statement, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) had found Theodore McCarrick guilty of “solicitation in the Sacrament of Confession, and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power.”
The decree imposed upon McCarrick “the penalty of dismissal from the clerical state,” the statement said.
Despite the expedited laicization of McCarrick, the question remains why Francis failed to act sooner, especially if — as has been alleged — he knew of McCarrick’s crimes as early as 2013.
Former Vatican nuncio to the United States Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published an 11-page report last August that the pope had learned of McCarrick’s misdeeds at least as early as 2013 — since the official personally informed him — and yet lifted sanctions against McCarrick and rehabilitated him as an advisor in naming new American bishops.
