Who am I to judge? Pope Francis explains his point of view

The famous line of Pope Francis "Who am I to judge?" could go a long way in explaining his initial attitude towards Theodore McCarrick, the disgraced American cardinal who was the subject of a two-year Vatican investigation released last week.

Francis made the line on July 29, 2013, four months after his pontificate, when he was asked to return home from his first papal trip on news of a sexually active gay priest he had just promoted. His point: If someone violated the church's teaching on sexual morality in the past but asked God for forgiveness, who was he to pass judgment?

The comment garnered acclaim from the LGBT community and brought Francis to the cover of The Advocate magazine. But Francis's broader tendency to blindly trust his friends and resist judging them created problems seven years later. A handful of priests, bishops and cardinals whom Francis has trusted over the years have turned out to be either accused of sexual misconduct or convicted, or of having covered up him.

In short, Francis's loyalty to them cost him credibility.

The Vatican report spared Francis the blame for McCarrick's rise in the hierarchy, instead blaming his predecessors for failing to effectively recognize, investigate, or sanction McCarrick for the consistent reports he invited seminarians to his bed.

Finally, last year, Francis discouraged McCarrick after a Vatican investigation found he was sexually abusing children and adults. Francis commissioned the more in-depth investigation after a former Vatican ambassador said in 2018 that about two dozen church officials were aware of McCarrick's sexual misconduct with adult seminarians but covered it up for two decades.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, an internal investigation commissioned by Francis and ordered publication by him would largely give him a lift. But it is also true that the most glaring failures linked to the McCarrick scandal occurred well before Francis became pope.

But the report points to the problems that came to haunt Francis during his papacy, exacerbating his initial blind spot on clerical sexual abuse that he corrected only in 2018 after realizing he failed a serious case of abuse and cover-up in Chile.

In addition to the prelates he initially defended who were accused of sexual misconduct or cover-up, Francis was also betrayed by lay Catholics: some Italian businessmen who were "friends of Francis" and exploited that designation are now involved in a dizzying spiral Investigation into corruption in the Vatican involving the investment of 350 million dollars by the Holy See in a London real estate firm.

Like many leaders, Francis hates gossip, mistrusts the media, and tends to follow his instincts, finding it extremely difficult to shift gears once he has formed a positive personal opinion about someone, his co-workers say.

Francis knew McCarrick from before he became pope and probably knew that the charismatic and well-connected prelate had a hand in his election as one of the many "kingmakers" who supported him from the sidelines. (McCarrick himself did not vote as he was over 80 and was not eligible.)

McCarrick said in a conference at Villanova University in late 2013 that he considered former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio a "friend" and had lobbied for a Latin American pope during closed-door meetings preceding the conclave.

McCarrick visited Bergoglio twice in Argentina, in 2004 and 2011, when he went there to ordain priests of the Argentine religious community, the Institute of the Incarnate Word, which he called home in Washington.

McCarrick told the Villanova conference he was persuaded to spread the word to consider Bergoglio a possible papal candidate after an unidentified "influential" Roman told him that Bergoglio could reform the church in five years and "get us back on target". .

"Talk to him," McCarrick said, quoting the Roman man.

The report debunked the central thesis of Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the former Vatican ambassador to the United States, whose denunciation in 2018 of McCarrick's XNUMX-year coverage triggered the Vatican report in the first place.

Viganò claimed that Francis had lifted the "sanctions" imposed by Pope Benedict XVI on McCarrick even after Vigano had told Francis in 2013 that the American had "corrupted generations of priests and seminarians".

The report said no such revocation had occurred and actually accused Vigano of being part of the cover-up. He also suggested that in 2013, Viganò was much more concerned with persuading Francis to bring him back to Rome from his exile in Washington to help with Francis' anti-corruption effort in the Vatican than to bring McCarrick to justice.

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis is believed to have served rumors of sexual abuse and cover-ups in neighboring Chile around popular priest Fernando Karadima, because most of the accusers were over 17, and therefore technically adults in the canon law system. of the church. . As such, they were considered consenting adults engaging in sinful but not illegal behavior with Karadima.

While he was the head of the Argentine bishops' conference, in 2010 Francis commissioned a four-volume forensic study on the legal case against Reverend Julio Grassi, a famous priest who ran homes for street children and was convicted of sexually abusing a of them.

Bergoglio's study, which allegedly ended up on the desk of some Argentine court judges ruling on Grassi's appeals, concluded that he was innocent, that his victims lied and that the case should never have gone to trial.

Eventually, Argentina's Supreme Court in March 2017 upheld Grassi's conviction and a 15-year prison sentence. The status of Grassi's canonical investigations in Rome is unknown.

More recently, Bergoglio allowed one of his proteges in Argentina, Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, to quietly resign for alleged health reasons in 2017 after priests in the remote northern Argentine diocese of Oran complained about his authoritarian rule and diocesan officials. they reported to the Vatican for alleged abuses of power, inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment of adult seminarians.

Francis gave Zanchetta a plum job in the Vatican treasury office.

In the cases of Grassi and Zanchetta, Bergoglio was a confessor to both men, suggesting that he may have been influenced in his judgment by his role as a spiritual father. In the case of Karadima, Francis was a good friend of Karadima's main protector, the archbishop of Santiago, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz.

Francesco's 2013 comment, "Who am I to judge?" it did not concern a priest accused of sexual misconduct with minors. Rather, it was assumed that the priest had first arranged for a Swiss army captain to move with him from his diplomatic post to Bern, Switzerland, Uruguay.

Asked about the priest traveling home from Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, Francis said he had commissioned a preliminary investigation into the allegations which found nothing. He noted that many times in the church, such "sins of youth" crop up as priests advance in rank.

"Crimes are something different: child abuse is a crime," he said. “But if a person, whether a layman, a priest or a religious, commits a sin and then gets converted, the Lord forgives. And when the Lord forgives, the Lord forgets and this is very important for our life “.

Referring to reports that a homosexual network in the Vatican protected the priest, Francis said he had never heard of such a thing. But he added: “If someone is gay and is seeking the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge?