THE DARK SIDE OF THE CHURCH: One of the most important qualities for any truth seeker is the ability to integrate new information, regardless if it affirms or debunks their previously held opinions and beliefs. As anyone that follows my posts will confirm, I’ve spoken very highly of Pope Francis since he passed away, and even before. Yet this afternoon I read an article that made me question my own narrative. I have compiled a fairly lengthy post for those willing to face some very uncomfortable truths.
It is by no means my intention to speak ill of the dead, but at the same time, I would be disrespecting the lived experience of thousands of sexual abuse victims if I said nothing. Which let’s be honest, on the day the church chooses a new Pope is easier to ignore than to address. What happens if I offend someone during this period of mourning and excitement? The truth is that I’d much rather offend someone else than to offend myself or those that suffered, and many others that continue to suffer in silence.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. – Wiki –
HOLY SMOKE: – We have listened to many complaints against Francis’s papacy in these days’, one unnamed cardinal told America Magazine, a Jesuit publication. In any case, we can be certain that Monday’s debate was haunted by a series of jaw-dropping scandals whose details are unknown to the vast majority of the 400,000 Catholics who attended Pope Francis’s funeral a week ago. If they had known, the crowds would have been much smaller.
For the common denominator of these scandals – whose victims included 20 Slovenian nuns who claim to have been raped, Argentinian seminarians grotesquely assaulted by their bishop and a Belgian teenager subjected to incestuous assault by his uncle, a bishop – is that Francis went to bizarre lengths either to conceal or excuse these crimes.
The ‘people’s Pope’ was elected in 2013 on a promise to hold the Church accountable for clerical sex abuse. And it’s true that he did establish new rules designed to punish bishops found guilty. But the first Argentinian pontiff did not practise what he preached. The darkest mystery of Francis’s 12-year reign was his persistent habit of shielding credibly accused and even convicted sexual predators from justice.
The Pope enjoys supreme authority over the Catholic Church.
He can twist or ignore canon law, which is supposed to punish sex offenders, and the Vatican state’s criminal law, without being challenged.
That is precisely what he did, again and again. Indeed, his sinister modus operandi predated his election: as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he tried to keep a priest who abused homeless boys out of jail.
Francis’s long record of protecting convicted and suspected predators should have been the biggest scandal to face the church in decades if not centuries.
‘A descent into hell’ was how ‘Anna’, a 58-year-old former Italian nun, described the nine years of abuse she claimed to have endured at the hands of Fr Marko Rupnik, a Slovenian Jesuit priest – and friend of Pope Francis – who became the world’s most successful mosaic artist.
In December 2022, Anna spoke to the Italian newspaper Domani, after his mosaics were installed in more than 200 Catholic holy places, including the basilicas of Lourdes and Fatima, the St John Paul II national shrine in Washington DC and a chapel in the Vatican.
But Church authorities poured hundreds of millions of pounds into commissions. Rupnik was untouchable. His alleged victims, however, were not. In the 1980s he founded an order of religious sisters in Slovenia.
Anna joined at 21, attracted by his ‘charisma’ and ‘sensitivity in identifying people’s weaknesses’.
He would touch her while he was explaining his art. Then, she says, ‘he kissed me lightly on the mouth, telling me that this was how he kissed the altar where he celebrated the Eucharist’. According to Anna, Rupnik would use theological language while molesting her. Soon after she took her religious vows, she said, he attacked her so violently she lost her virginity.
She said Rupnik abused 20 nuns, one of whom broke her arm trying to resist him.
Anna spoke out in 2022 because the Vatican, although advised by the Jesuit order that the claims were credible, refused to bring any charges under canon law against Rupnik.
In 2019 the priest was caught absolving a female victim in the confessional after a sexual encounter with her – a crime that earned him automatic excommunication when it came to light. Incredibly, while his excommunication was being processed, the Pope allowed him to deliver spiritual reflections to Vatican officials. And when the penalty was imposed, Francis mysteriously lifted it within weeks.
In 2023, news leaked that Rupnik – by now expelled from the Jesuits – was returning to ministry in Slovenia as a priest in good standing. The public reaction was so ferocious the Pope finally agreed to a trial. But nothing happened. In 2024 two former nuns from Rupnik’s community, Mirjiam Kovac and Gloria Branciani, held a press conference. Kovac spoke of ‘young girls’ subjected to sadistic abuse.
Branciani described being forced into a sexual threesome modelled on the Holy Trinity and how this would involve having to ‘drink his semen from a chalice at dinner’. In another interview, Branciani said when Rupnik ‘threw himself on me’, she protested: ‘But I could get pregnant.’ The priest’s chilling reply? ‘You can always have an abortion.’ Still Francis did nothing.
When it came to protecting his abuser allies from justice – however diabolical the crime – the late Pope was a repeat offender.
This is a small section of an article written by Damian Thompson. A former editor of the Catholic Herald, associate editor of The Spectator and presenter of its Holy Smoke religious podcast. Article 3 May 2025 – How the People’s Pope shielded sexual predators in the clergy – including one priest accused of violently raping nuns.
PREDATOR PRIESTS: Pope Francis has issued a letter to Catholics around the world condemning the ‘crime’ of priestly sexual abuse and cover-up. Francis demanded accountability in response to new revelations in the United States of decades of misconduct by the Catholic Church. He begged forgiveness for the pain suffered by victims and said lay Catholics must be involved in any effort to root out abuse and cover-up.
He blasted the self-referential clerical culture that has been blamed for the abuse crisis, with church leaders more concerned for their reputation than the safety of children. Francis wrote: ‘We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.’
The Vatican issued the letter Monday, ahead of Francis’ trip this weekend to Ireland that is expected to be dominated by the abuse crisis. The Vatican has come under fire for its failure to respond to a shocking grand jury report which alleged decades of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Pennsylvania.
At least 1,000 children were molested and assaulted by ‘predator priests’ who used Catholic rituals and symbols of the faith to commit their horrifying abuse, the grand jury found.
Priests across Pennsylvania used religious rituals and the threat of eternity in hell to groom, molest and rape children, a grand jury found, in what the state’s top prosecutor Josh Shapiro called the ‘weaponization of faith.’
In a letter to the Pope, Shapiro said the report had found a ‘systemic cover-up’ of the sexual abuse by leaders of the Catholic church.
He called on the Pope to urge church leaders to ‘abandon their destructive efforts to silence the survivors’ and ‘follow the path of truth’. One priest tied up a victim with rope in the confessional in a ‘praying position,’ the grand jury wrote. When the victim refused to perform sex, the angered priest used a 7-inch crucifix to sexually assault him, the report said.
One priest rinsed a boy’s mouth with holy water after abusing him while another priest allegedly told a boy he was fondling that it was OK because he was ‘an instrument of God.’ In another church, a priest told a boy who confided he had been gang-raped as a 7-year-old that he had to provide sex to get to heaven.
At a parish rectory, the report said, four of the priests made a boy strip and pose as Jesus on the cross while they took photos. Only two of the priests have been charged with crimes as a result of the grand jury investigation, though a number were prosecuted in years past. Over 100 have died, and many others have retired. The Pennsylvania grand jury said that in almost every case there, the statute of limitations for bringing criminal charges has run out. – By Associated Press -20 August 2018 |
THE DEVIL MADE HIM DO IT: Pope Francis has claimed Satan is behind the sex abuse cover-up scandal engulfing the Catholic church The head of the Catholic church said the devil ‘had it in’ for bishops ‘in order to scandalise the people’. Although he did not mention recent sex abuse cover-up allegations directly, the speech seemed to reference the Theodore McCarrick scandal from earlier this year.
The US prelate was removed and ordered to live a lifetime of penance and prayer by Pope Francis after a church investigation determined that an allegation he groped a teenage altar boy in the 1970s was credible. Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano claimed in an 11-page statement Francis lifted unconfirmed Vatican sanctions against the disgraced McCarrick when Benedict XVI was in the papal throne.
As a result the former papal envoy to Washington called for the pope to resign. Hours after Vigano made the statement to conservative Catholic news media, Francis had told journalists he ‘won’t say a word’ about the sensational claims.
Last month Francis called for ‘silence and prayer’ for those involved in the scandal and criticised Irish church authorities for failing to act over sexual abuse allegations after he met with victims in Dublin.
Addressing the congregation at the Vatican yesterday, he suggested the ‘Great Accuser’ – or the devil – was behind Vigano’s revelations. He said: ‘In these times, it seems like the ‘Great Accuser’ has been unchained and has it in for bishops.
‘True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalise the people.’ After the allegations against McCarrick were publicised in June, it emerged that it was apparently an open secret – including at the Vatican – and that he routinely molested seminarians and young priests and harassed them.
Bishops should be men of prayer and should know they were chosen by God and keep close to their flock, he added. In other eyebrow-raising comments on Tuesday, a top aide to both Francis and Benedict said the sex abuse scandal was such a game-changing catastrophe for the church that it amounted to its ‘own 9/11’.
But he said the years-long scandal, and recent revelations in the Pennsylvania grand jury report, showed just ‘how many souls have been wounded irrevocably and mortally by priests from the Catholic Church’.
He added: ‘Today, even the Catholic Church looks full of confusion at its own 9/11, at its own September 11, even though this catastrophe isn’t associated with a single date but rather at so many days and years, and innumerable victims.’
Di Nardo said he wants Francis to authorise a full-fledged Vatican investigation into ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was removed as cardinal in July after a credible accusation that he groped a teenager.
The Vatican has known since at least 2000 that McCarrick would invite seminarians to his New Jersey beach house and into his bed.
And yet St John Paul II made him archbishop of Washington and a cardinal in 2001, presumably because Vatican officials impressed by his fundraising prowess considered his past homosexual activity a mere ‘moral lapse’ and not a gross abuse of power. DiNardo also said recent accusations that top Vatican officials – including the current pope – covered up for McCarrick since 2000 deserve answers. The summit recalls the April 2002 meeting John Paul called with the senior US church leadership after the sex abuse scandal first exploded publicly in Boston. By Chris Dyer for AP.
A SERIOUS MISTAKE: Early in 2018, Pope Francis met with Bishop Juan Barros from Chile concerning the charges of sexual abuse by Fr. Fernando Karadima, and accusations of cover-up by Barros. Many laypersons and victims of sexual abuse came forward to condemn Barros for covering up the sex crimes. When Pope Francis visited the bishop, he was asked by local reporters about the sexual abuse scandal surrounding Barros. Pope Francis quickly condemned the charges a “slander”, stating, “The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I will speak. There is not one piece of evidence against him. It is calumny. Is that clear?”
Following the pope’s defense of Barros, Boston Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley, a key Vatican advisor on clergy abuse, acknowledged that Francis’ comments about Barros were “a source of great pain” for victims. Francis then appointed Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta to investigate the allegations of abuse in the Chilean church. Upon receiving Scicluna’s report, Francis wrote on 12 April that he had “made serious mistakes in the assessment and perception of the situation, especially because of a lack of truthful and balanced information.”
He also declared that the Chilean church hierarchy was collectively responsible for “grave defects” in handling sexual abuse cases and the resulting loss of credibility suffered by the church. Following Francis’ remarks, 33 Chilean bishops offered their resignation. Pope Francis later apologized to the victims of the sex abuse scandal. In late April 2018, three victims were invited to the Vatican. – Wiki –
ASHAMED AND DISMAYED: Germany’s Catholic Church said the institution was ‘ashamed’ by nearly seven decades of child sex abuse by priests. A leaked new study showed that 1,670 clergymen in Germany committed some form of sexual attack against 3,677 minors between 1946 and 2014.
Bishop Stephan Ackermann said on behalf of the German Bishops’ Conference: ‘We know the extent of the sexual abuse that has been demonstrated by the study. We are dismayed and ashamed by it.
‘This is a dark side of our Church, for the sake of those affected, but also for us ourselves to see the errors and to do everything to prevent them from being repeated.’
The research also uncovered how priests got away with their abuses, with official documents manipulated or simply shredded. Predator priests were often transferred to another location, but information on their criminal history were not provided to the new site.
Only one in three – 566 out of 1,670 accused – were subject to disciplinary hearings by the Church, and most got away with minimal punishment with 154 cases ending with no penalty, while 103 investigations closed with just a warning. Only 38 per cent of the accused were prosecuted by civil courts – on complaints lodged by victims themselves or their families.
Over the last decade, several German Catholic institutions have had allegations of child sexual abuse cases, including an elite Jesuit school in Berlin which admitted to systematic sexual abuse of pupils by two priests in the 1970s and 1980s. Last year, a world-famous Catholic choir school in Germany, the Regensburger Domspatzen school, revealed that more than 500 boys there suffered sexual or physical abuse in what victims have likened to ‘prison, hell or a concentration camp’. By CHRIS DYER FOR MAILONLINE and ASSOCIATED PRESS 11 September 2018 |
Pope Francis – Pope Benedict – Pope John Paul ll – Mosaicist and Jesuit Fr Marko Rupnick.
May 07, 2025 8:23:15 pm
