Pope Francis has pledged to rid the Catholic Church of sexual abuse and offered prayers to victims of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a day after the Vatican released a detailed report into the decades long church cover-up of his sexual misconduct.
The Vatican report blamed a host of bishops, cardinals and popes for downplaying and dismissing mountains of evidence of McCarrick’s misconduct starting in the 1990s — but largely spared Pope Francis.
Instead, it laid the lion’s share of the blame on St. John Paul II, a former pope, for having appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington in 2000, and making him a cardinal, despite having commissioned an inquiry that found he had slept with seminarians.
Pope Francis concluded his weekly general audience by recalling that the report into the “painful case” of the former high-ranking American cardinal had been released the previous day.
Pope Francis defrocked the 90-year-old McCarrick last year after a separate Vatican investigation found he sexually abused children as well as adults.
He authorized the more in-depth study into McCarrick’s rise through the hierarchy after revelations that it was an open secret in the U.S. and Vatican hierarchies that he behaved inappropriately with seminarians, sleeping with them in his bed on weekend getaways.
[Source: Associated Press]
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