Fighting Evil Should Know No Factions

Yesterday in a historically unique event, Archbishop Vigano, a former nuncio to the United States, released an eleven page document in which he claimed that former-Cardinal McCarrick's predations (at least against young priests and seminarians) were reported to the Vatican even before his installation as the Archbishop of Washington DC in 2001. Vigano further says that Pope Benedict privately ordered McCarrick to move out of the seminary to which he had retired and to cease acting publicly as a leader of the church. (Though McCarrick was sidelined, he certainly did not withdraw into a life of prayer and penance.) Vigano claims that although he himself warned Pope Francis right after his election that McCarrick “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.” Pope Francis nonetheless make McCarrick a global spokesman for the Church (sending him on various diplomatic missions) and also used him as a primary advisor on who to promote from the United States to key episcopal sees and to curial positions.

The claim that McCarrick was rehabilitated by Francis after Benedict sidelined him is hardly a controversial one. Here's National Catholic Reporter trumpeting the same claim back in 2014 in a puff piece about the "globe-trotting Cardinal McCarrick":

The day before a newly elected Pope Francis was to be formally installed at the Vatican in 2013, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was celebrating Mass in St. Peter's Basilica when he passed out at the altar and had to be rushed to the hospital.

It was a scary moment, and especially odd to see McCarrick stricken; even at 82, the energetic former archbishop of Washington always had a reputation as one of the most peripatetic churchmen in the Catholic hierarchy.

Doctors in Rome quickly diagnosed a heart problem -- McCarrick would eventually get a pacemaker -- and the cardinal was soon back at his guest room in the U.S. seminary in Rome when the phone rang. It was Francis. The two men had known each other for years, back when the Argentine pope was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires. McCarrick assured Francis that he was doing fine.

"I guess the Lord isn't done with me yet," he told the pope.

"Or the devil doesn't have your accommodations ready!" Francis shot back with a laugh.

McCarrick loves to tell that story, because he loves to tell good stories and because he has a sense of humor as keen as the pope's. But the exchange also says a lot about the improbable renaissance McCarrick is enjoying as he prepares to celebrate his 84th birthday in July.

McCarrick is one of a number of senior churchmen who were more or less put out to pasture during the eight-year pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI. But now Francis is pope, and prelates like Cardinal Walter Kasper (another old friend of McCarrick's) and McCarrick himself are back in the mix and busier than ever.

McCarrick in particular has been on a tear in the past year, traveling to the Philippines to console typhoon victims and visiting geopolitical pivot points such as China and Iran for sensitive talks on religious freedom and nuclear proliferation.

"I truly believe there should be a religious channel in handling things where you do not have the diplomatic channel," he told NBC's "Meet the Press" last month after a trip to Tehran.

McCarrick travels regularly to the Middle East and was in the Holy Land for Francis' visit in May. "The bad ones, they never die!" the pope teased McCarrick again when he saw him.

Perhaps I'm jumping at shadows, but I have to say that Pope Francis's jokes in this piece also sound a little dark at this point.

Nor does Pope Francis's refusal to give any response to Vigano's claims exactly seem reassuring.

So what to make of all this.

Even in our current straits, I'm finding it a bit hard to believe that Pope Francis recognized that McCarrick was a serial abuser and yet decided to make him a major part of his leadership team anyway. If that is true, then against all appearances Francis is a deeply evil man and we have all been victims of his duplicity.

And yet it seems impossible to conclude at this point that there's nothing to Vigano's claims. If they were totally untrue, the pope and the Vatican could always do what we do with totally false claims: say that they're false.

One possibility is that Francis was told that McCarrick was accused of forcing himself on seminarians and young priests, and had been "put out to pasture" by Benedict as unsound, but that Francis liked McCarrick and considered many of his critics to be ideologues, and thus decided that they were trafficking in false rumors.

Another possibility is that Francis believed reports to some extent, but interpreted them as, "He's been unfaithful to his vows on occasion, but he's still basically a sound guy and he's on the right side when it comes to what the Church needs right now." (It's worth noting in this regard, that so far as we know it was only accusations of McCarrick luring priests and seminarians into his bed which had made it to the Vatican at that point. It's not clear that any accusations that he had abused children had yet surfaced.)

Both of these would suggest that the holy father had allowed himself to put factional concerns above basic concerns of good and evil.

If there is one thing we have learned after the last eighteen years in which waves of abuse scandal revelations have washed over the Church, it is that we can never assume that accusations of abuse are false simply because the accused is on "the right side" of some internal Church division. Abusers have been uncovered in every sector of the Church.

The other possibility (that Francis believed the reports enough to think that McCarrick had had a fling or two with seminarians but still considered him basically sound) is even worse. There is no ideological alignment, no set of speaking or administrative skills, so important that we should wink at a bishop who lures subordinates into his bed in order to retain his talents. The Church's purpose is to bring Christ's grace and truth to the world. Sin and lies can never be the servants of grace and truth.