Takeaways from Vatican's McCarrick report as US bishops meet

U.S. Catholic bishops are holding their annual fall assembly virtually this week with the Vatican's recent report on the rise and fall of disgraced ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick one of their main topics for discussion.

Released last week after a two-year investigation, the report found that three decades of bishops, cardinals and popes dismissed or downplayed reports McCarrick shared his bed with seminarians.

Pope Francis defrocked McCarrick last year after a Vatican investigation determined he sexually abused children and adults. Francis acted after a former altar boy came forward in 2017 with allegations McCarrick groped him in the 1970s.

Francis commissioned the more in-depth probe into who knew what and when after a former Vatican ambassador, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, alleged in 2018 that some two dozen church officials were aware of McCarrick's sexual misconduct with adult seminarians but covered it up for two decades.

Here are some key takeaways from the report.

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WHAT WERE THE MAIN CONCLUSIONS?

John Paul appears to have been swayed by a last-minute letter McCarrick wrote to his secretary, then-Bishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, asserting he never had "sexual relations" with anyone.

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WHAT HAPPENED UNDER POPE BENEDICT XVI?

Benedict (2005-2013) took some ultimately ineffective steps in 2005, after the Vatican received documentation from a former Metuchen, New Jersey, seminarian who in 1994 complained to his bishop about abuse by McCarrick.

Benedict decided against a canonical trial or sanction, in part because the Vatican's in-house legal code didn't provide ways to prosecute old cases of priests who slept with young men. Instead, the Vatican's bishops office urged McCarrick to keep a low profile and minimize his travel.

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WHAT HAPPENED UNDER POPE FRANCIS?

The report found that Francis, who became pope in 2013, did not lift or alter those restrictions on McCarrick, nor did he investigate further when aides told him about the cardinal's past. It said Francis merely continued in the path charted by Benedict.

However, McCarrick's travel seems to have intensified under Francis and had his blessing. He corresponded directly with the pope — 17 known letters in four years — and the Vatican's secretary of state about his efforts to forge better relations with China and Muslim leaders.

The report, organized chronologically, devotes a small fraction of its attention to the current papacy, starting on page 393 of the 449-page document. It said Francis had never heard of any restrictions on McCarrick prior to becoming pope, and only heard from his No. 2, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, about "past imprudent acts with adults."

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WHO IS VIGANO, AND WAS HE PROVED RIGHT?

Vigano was a career Vatican diplomat who served in the secretariat of state before being named to run the Vatican City State in 2009. During his tenure, he claimed credit for rooting out corruption and waste, but his zeal ruffled feathers and Benedict in 2011 transferred him to be ambassador to the U.S.

In Washington through 2016, Vigano became strongly affiliated with the conservative wing of the U.S. church that dominated the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, becoming a champion of its opposition to gay marriage and abortion. A dozen or so U.S. bishops meeting this week publicly vouched for his integrity after his 2018 expose.

The most explosive allegation in Vigano's 2018 denunciation was that Francis lifted "sanctions" imposed by Benedict and made McCarrick a trusted adviser who had a hand in U.S. bishop nominations. Vigano called on Francis to resign for having ignored what he said was his own verbal warning in 2013 that McCarrick had "corrupted generations of priests and seminarians."