Pope Francis Must Resign: Archbishop Vigano

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This is good advice and a good reminder for many of us today.
 
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tafan2 said:
Too much concern for due process had little, if any, role at all.
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Agree. And the reason criminals in USA have due process is not because of the Church. It’s because of the US Constitution and the expansion of due process rights by the Warren Court. It’s not like Scalia, the most visible Catholic on the bench, didn’t try to reign in due process rights any chance he got.
 
The sad part is that the solutions are fairly straightforward. All that is lacking is the will to take effective action.
 
exnihilo said:
What is proving a claim? There are many degrees of credibility. But a lot of claims turn out to simply be one person’s word versus another. How do you justly determine who is telling the truth in such situations?
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I think the word “prove” is thrown around a lot. It has different meanings to different people.

Let’s say there is a basketball game in a gym. There are 1,000 spectators. Joe Blow calls the police and says “There is a bomb set to go off in 10 minutes.” Do the police sit back and examine Joe Blow’s character? Is he credible? Has he lied before? Do they give Joe Blow “due process”? Let’s say that after Joe Blow’s call they immediately get another call saying Joe Blow is a liar. Do they do nothing? Do they “investigate”? Do they wait for “proof” that Joe Blow is telling the truth? No–they evacuate the stadium–i.e., get people out of danger–and deal with Joe Blow’s credibility later.

In the same way, we have people actively in danger. The problem is we don’t know where and we don’t know who they are. But we do have some idea of who is going to harm them. So we have a choice–do we get people out of danger by suspending the suspects, or do we spend time wondering if the accusations are 100% “proof.” To me the answer is obvious. Suspend the suspects NOW and deal with guilt or innocence later.
 
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EnglishTeacher said:
But once he is chosen, the protection of the Holy Spirit is promised to the office of pope in that he is protected against teaching error in his official capacity as pope.
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Does the Holy Spirit protect the pope in everything or just in his teaching of faith and morals?
 
7_Sorrows said:
I wish the Pope could have come up with a better response than using the word “caca”. He is the leader of over 1 billion
Catholics worldwide. I wish he could have expressed himself using a different vocabulary.
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I thought he reportedly used that word when speaking privately with a female victim in Ireland?
 
Hope1960 said:
Does the Holy Spirit protect the pope in everything or just in his teaching of faith and morals?
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The Holy Spirit protects the Church in Faith and Morals; the Pope enjoys this protection by extension because the Pope can speak unilaterally for the Church in certain circumstances.

Popes can, and have, failed in Faith and Morals, but not when speaking unilaterally for the Church.
 
pnewton said:
It is time for Catholic to put aside their foolishness and show a little fortitude. God’s ways are not Man’s ways, and he did not set up His body to operate like the Deist, Humanist Founding Fathers set up the United States. The papacy is not subject to what ever clergy can cry or lie the loudest or make the news the most. It is not subject to whatever politically correct wind happens to rile the ignorant masses. It is subject to God alone. The only petition for his removal from us, if we must, should be to God. The only request for his resignation, should have been to him, not the media.
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Yeah but you can’t have it both ways. One thing the data shows is that like it or not, God is not protecting the Catholic Church from these abuses happening. If God was specially protecting the Church then there would be a much lower rate of abuse compared to other institutions. Since, at least when it comes to abuse, God isn’t protecting the Church anymore than He does the public school system, firefighters, or hospitals, why would you expect God to fix it? If what is being said about Pope Francis is true then he needs to go. Period. We can’t sit around waiting on God to fix this mess.
 
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Even in your bomb threat scenario the police should actually consider the credibility of the person calling police. If the call comes from someone who every day calls in the same threat then it would be foolish to evacuate a stadium. There isn’t a single answer as to how to handle any particular claim.
 
Erikaspirit16 said:
Yes, that’s right. What it DOESN’T say is that the police had already investigated (“an intensive investigation” according to county officials) and found the accused priest was innocent of the charges. So yes, in light of the intensive police investigation that found the priest innocent, Vigano stopped the parallel church investigation. Sounds logical to me.
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Tagging @bullish1 because you were interested…

Erikaspirit16, I think you are conflating two unrelated investigations. You didn’t say what “priest” you are referring to, but based on your quote from wikipedia, I suspect you’re referring to the county officials’ decision not to file criminal charges against Archbishop Nienstedt after the investigation of a single allegation about a boy at a photo session.

The non-criminal investigation Archbishop Vigano is accused of shutting down was looking into charges of sex and sexual harassment by Archbishop Nienstedt with other priests or seminarians. The two investigations are completely unrelated. There was no criminal investigation into the latter.

As a resident of the diocese and someone who has attended Fr. Griffith’s parishes many times over the past 15 years, I believe his documentation about how it went down. And I agree with John’s Allen point that “By not at least trying to explain his actions in the Nienstedt case, Vigano left open some serious question marks.”

www.twincities.com

Vatican ambassador sought to bury Nienstedt misconduct, documents say

From the outset, Daniel Griffith assured the investigators the church didn’t want “a white-wash or a witch hunt,” but the unvarnished truth. One priest had already been convicted …
www.twincities.com www.twincities.com

But the evidence was compelling enough that in April 2014, Griffith, Piche, auxilliary bishop Andrew Cozzens and other archdiocese officials reviewed what had come in so far and agreed Nienstedt should resign, according to another 2014 memo from Griffith. Piche and Cozzens went to Washington to meet with Apostilic Nuncio Carlo Maria Vigano, the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S. Nienstedt went with them.

But after meeting with the three men, Vigano ordered investigators to interview Nienstedt quickly, stop looking into new leads — there were still dozens to pursue — and “wrap up the investigation,” Griffith wrote.

[Auxiliary bishops] Piche and Cozzens objected in a letter, saying “this would rightly be seen as a cover-up,” Griffith wrote. According to Griffith’s July memo, Vigano ordered them to take back the letter and destroy it.
 
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And now we have a confirmation of another detail of Vigano’s letter:

http://catholicherald.co.uk/comment...and-potential-seminarians/?platform=hootsuite

We also have the report that Pope Emeritus Benidict does not recall the details of sanctioning McCarrick, but he did some penalty on him.

And we have the Monsignor Jean-François Lantheaume saying “Vigano spoke the truth” with regards to a meeting between then Nunci Pietro Sambi and McCarrick.

There are other details in the letter which can be verified by independent sources. The more that are verified, the harder it will be to buy into the wholesale discrediting of Archbishop Vigano which seems to be taking place.
 
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So far everything in Vigano’s testimony is checking out and the accused, including the Pope, have denied nothing. The Pope needs to resign and we need a new pope that will clean up this mess.
 
The worst-case scenario is that Francis was fully aware of everything that McCarrick had done but lifted the sanctions anyway. There are number of another scenarios that seem more likely, but aren’t quite as bad. For example, it doesn’t look like these sanctions–whatever they were–were written down anywhere. Perhaps Francis was told or believed that McCarrick had had a number of consensual affairs, and so wasn’t beyond rehabilitation.

Again, I’m just speculating. There are any number of possibilities. Notably, Vigano doesn’t say explicitly that Francis was aware of what McCarrick had done; just that he lifted the sanctions.
 
This^^^

I wish I could give 10 likes for this one.
 
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wkj_123 said:
Yeah but you can’t have it both ways. One thing the data shows is that like it or not, God is not protecting the Catholic Church from these abuses happening. If God was specially protecting the Church then there would be a much lower rate of abuse compared to other institutions
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First, I disagree with your point. There is no other institution that is world wide. Also, I would argue that the current statistics are lower, if only for now. The second problem with you said is that yes, I can have it both ways, since your second “way” is that God protects his Church from sin occurring and sinners being sinners. That has never happened. It never will happen. It is a straw man because no one is saying it will happen.
wkj_123 said:
to fix this mess.
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Still begging the question. This attack against Pope Francis cannot be made with reason. Even the AB abandoned reason at multiple points in his letter.
 
Mtdobbs said:
Can somebody find put what sanctions Benedict placed on mcCarrck. I have found conflicting things. Some say he was asked to leave he seminary and others say Benedict allowed him to reside at the seminary where was living. Any answers would be helpful.
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I have been asking for this. No one has found these sanctions. Even AB Vigano, the man on whose memory is being relied on by those grabbing pitchforks and torches, cannot give the year, exactly. Catholics have abandoned Church teaching, especially those who do not like Pope Francis, on rash judgment, and never considered that AB Vigano may be wrong, not only about what Pope Benedict did, but also about what Pope Francis knew.
 
Yes, I describe a scenario similar to your example above. I do not believe that the Pope was fully aware and did nothing. I think it is most likely that the sanctions were privately imposed by Benedict, largely up to McCarrick himself to follow them, and Pope Francis only thought of what he was dealing with hearsay and was willing to give McCarrick the benefit of the doubt. Not a perfect response, but neither is it damning. And this type of scenario is the most likely, by far. Even in Vigano’s letter where he described how he responded to the Pope’s question about McCarrick, he did not list details and although it was very strongly worded, it was only dealt in generalities. He did not provide Francis with any sort of “list” of all of McCarrick’s misdeeds.
 
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