Pope Francis Must Resign: Archbishop Vigano

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Can we cut the calls for the Pope’s resignation out please? We do not know near enough to even be approaching this level. We should simply be supporting the US Bishops in their call for a complete investigation.
 
Right, in a nutshell, because the whole Church cannot fall into error, acts by the Pope that would definitively and irrefomably introduce error into the “law of faith” must be infallible as well. Other than that, the Pope can sin and say erroneous things like the rest of us.
 
pnewton said:
First, I disagree with your point
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Your actually missing the whole point. The problem is in the way the Church is set up. We don’t know that Pope Francis is guilty of anything at this point. Let’s for arguments sake say that it comes out the allegations against him turn out to be true. What then? There is no way to remove him. Your answer to this problem is
pnewton said:
The only petition for his removal from us, if we must, should be to God
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But see how that’s having your cake and eating it too? There have been very bad Pope’s in history. God obviously let’s them act that way on free will so why would God remove them? It makes no sense. If God can just remove a Pope then he could also prevent a bad one, but He doesn’t. We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. The Church is set up to be conducive of these scandals. Men are being put in very powerful positions and just expected to police themselves. How well has that worked out so far. You say this
pnewton said:
he did not set up His body to operate like the Deist, Humanist Founding Fathers set up the United States
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But honestly that’s the problem, there are no checks and balances. You can think that the wicked founding fathers set up such a terrible system of government all you want, but it’s exactly what I think the Church needs. If all the closed off, covering for each other, and covering up for the institution with shifting priests and Bishops and hiding crimes was replaced with full transparency and democracy the Church would be much better off in my opinion. We have tried it the other way and look where we are.
 
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I think you are misunderstanding what people mean by “due process”. In your gym bomb threat scenario, due process would include evacuating the gym AND investigating the threat after evacuation. The police would not just evacuate the gym, then say “welp, that’s sorted. Have a good weekend! No one ever go in the gym again!” And bounce. No, they would follow through with checking for a bomb. If found to be true, defuse it and well done Joe alerting everybody. If false, Joe goes in the clink for endangering the public. You seem to be claiming that searching for the bomb is unimportant and distracting. But it is a key part of the process of taking the threat seriously. Due process, if you will.

More specifically with the Church, due process REQUIRES the immediate removal of the accused from ministry, followed by an investigation. The problem is not that the investigation requires too much evidence, but rather that the evidence is ignored or covered up.

We don’t just go around burning people at the stake because they weigh more than a duck.
 
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griz said:
I am much more concerned by the politically motivated attacks by Vigano and his allies in the fake Catholic media.
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I didn’t know that the Catholic media was fake. Why is it fake? Which Catholic news services do you say are fake?
 
Wampa said:
Erikaspirit16, I think you are conflating two unrelated investigations.
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Actually, no I’m not! But as I keep reading, what a mess it was—priests all over the place abusing people (boys, girls, you name it) Archbishop Nienstedt doing the right thing, then the wrong thing…it’s making my brain hurt.

First, even if Vigano “covered up” some wrongdoing, it doesn’t mean his letter on Saturday wasn’t true. It would be nicer, of course, if we could actually find an archbishop somewhere with clean hands, but ultimately that doesn’t decide the truth of his allegations.

However, here’s my understanding of the Archbishop Nienstedt business: on Dec. 17, 2013 he voluntarily stepped aside from his duties when police said (the day before) they were investigating a charge that he had touched a boy on the buttocks in 2009. Nienstedt said he was innocent. On March 11, 2014 police cleared him. (The “intensive investigation” I referred to earlier.) It was immediately after this finding of innocence that Vigano told the archdiocese to back off the investigation.

However, the article you referenced (Vatican tried to bury Nienstedt misconduct, memos say) talks about an entirely DIFFERENT investigation, one that was open-ended (the archdiocese gave the law firm “free reign”). A major part of the case was that Nienstedt was friends with another priest who was found guilty in 2012 of abuse–but of course the article doesn’t say WHEN they were friends; before the conviction? After? It matters. Nienstedt meanwhile said it was all a smear campaign because of his anti-gay priest stance. And then it dissolves into a morass of so-and-so did this and that on this date, and did Nienstedt know… I’m not going to sort it out. My guess (personal opinon!!!) is that Vigano, as a conservative, sympathized with Nienstedt, and when he was found innocent on one charge, he told the archdiocese to back off on the wider investigation too. Perhaps he saw it as “a witch hunt” (although that term has now forever been linked with a certain person). I don’t know. Only Vigano knows.

Anyway, an interesting sidelight to all this, and yet another demonstration of how widespread all of this was.
Minnesota! Come on, that’s Mary Tyler Moore country!
 
Wampa said:
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.”
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I am not going to try and defend what Vigano did or did not do. Nienstedt either for that matter. After looking at everything, which involved several investigations, Nienstedt was not prosecuted by the civil system and cleared to remain a retired Archbishop by the Church authorities. This does not prove anything either way really.
 
griz said:
I am much more concerned by the politically motivated attacks by Vigano and his allies in the fake Catholic media.
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EVERY major Catholic news outlet, from the most liberal to conservative, has reported on this. Brushing it off as “fake media” is just not accurate.
 
Erikaspirit16 said:
Actually, no I’m not! But as I keep reading, what a mess it was—priests all over the place abusing people (boys, girls, you name it) Archbishop Nienstedt doing the right thing, then the wrong thing…it’s making my brain hurt.
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Yeah! No kidding! My brain hurts too! But I am not going to quit. It’s made worse by the trolls here that twist and distort almost everything you say. Our call for accountability and answers is an attack on the Pope. If we don’t blindly accept their “invitation” to be quiet on the matter, it because we aren’t real Catholics or don’t understand as much as they do. That is not to say that there aren’t some pretty wacky things being said. On both sides. But it would be nice for the discourse to be of logical arguments and no personal attacks.
 
NCR has not called for Pope Francis to resign. I doubt EWTN has either. They are in no way fake news.

Church Militant and LifeSite are generally regarded as fringe here. They might qualify as fake news, but it’s more accurate to say that they take real news stories and then add a significant amount of opinion/spin to cater to their extreme bases.
 
FirstFiveEighth said:
I think you are misunderstanding what people mean by “due process”. In your gym bomb threat scenario, due process would include evacuating the gym AND investigating the threat after evacuation.
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“Due process” in USA means “due process of law” and it is concerned primarily with respecting the constitutional rights of the accused suspect.

It doesn’t have much to do with what you’re describing, except that the suspect’s rights would have to be kept in mind while arresting him and gathering evidence, or you will have big trouble trying to prosecute him. Evacuating the gym is police procedure and protocol. Has nothing to do with due process.
 
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Clarification: Pope Francis should only step down if he is indeed guilty of what he has been accused of.
 
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. 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? I
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Again, this is making me feel even worse. If our Church is the One True Church, why isn’t God protecting her? Especially with all the prayers. If God answered prayer, one would assume He’d for sure, answer prayers to protect His Church and followers.
 
I’m concerned with the labelling of the archbishop of Philadelphia as a “right winger”. Has he denied saying this?
 
I have been struggling with this as well. My faith is shaky. However, a deep, very deep, truth is screaming inside me that I am beginning to recognize. God IS protecting His One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church. He is identifying the cancer that has been eating away at His flesh and calling doctors to rid His body of it. The True Church will survive and be well again at the end of this ordeal. I pray I am counted in that number.
 
Laura Ingraham is a right wing outrage celebrity who got herself a show on Fox News. I think she should resign instead.
 
Yeah I know that due process is a legal framework in the US. It doesn’t change the fact that the term “due process” can be used in other contexts, such as here, in the general sense of fairly investigating something. The other poster laid out the bomb-in-gym scenario to talk about due process, not me.

It’s like claiming you can only use the phrase “unalienable rights” to talk about US constitutional law and in no other context.
 
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