Another heroic saint in the Church speaks out…

…on behalf of the only people who actually matter in the Church’s abuse scandal, victims:

The core mistake being made by the Cult of Vigano is not in thinking that the Pope could have treated victims badly. We already know that he did that with the victims in Chile and that strongly suggests he did the same in Argentina. We will see if and when the records there are opened.

No. The core evil being done by the Cult of Vigano is in taking the focus off the only people who matter and turning it into a power struggle in which the goal is to focus all rage and spite on gays and liberals as the sole source of the problem.

The reality is that that problem is abusers, gay and straight, and their enablers, as this story of a priest who turned up dead before he brought evidence against his abusive heterosexual bishop illustrates.

This story illustrates, yet again, that the “PURGE THE QUEERS AND THE LIBS!” mantra of the perpetually wrong American conservative cult of Francis Haters fails to grasp this. Vigano’s palace coup is designed to feed that false narrative, thereby leaving in people like this bishop and the dangerous and deadly cultus that surrounds him. Because he is a good, healthy, red-blooded heterosexual rapist.

It needs to be faced that this is a global issue and that we are likely see almost every bishop in the world behaved as American bishops did before the punishing scourge of the scandal and the giant outcry of American Catholics put the fear of God into them and they instituted reforms.

It is not the case that the reforms were a sham and a waste of time. The mechanism put in place by the bishops a decade ago has, in fact, done a spectacular job of getting rid of abusers quickly. Joseph Klest, an attorney who has prosecuted over 500 cases against the Church has hailed it as a model of reform that many other institutions (*cough* the US Department of Education *cough*) could profit from emulating.

The failure of the reform was that it did not touch the bishops themselves and, most especially, that it did not (and could not, without Rome) affect cardinals since cardinals are subject to only one authority on US soil, the apostolic nuncio who acts on behalf of the pope. So McCarrick skated because the one man who could have done something about him–Abp. Vigano–did nothing and then, to cover his butt, blamed the only pope who *did* do something about him.

The key is to do what this brave woman is doing: call the media and the cops if you are a victim and, if you are in the state, open an investigation of the records. The horror stories that came out of Pennsylvania were old ones, pre-reform. But they still needed to be heard and the victims still require justice. Another component of that is to fight the bishops’ attempt to use statutes of limitation to skate.

The chief reformer of the Church in all this will be Caesar. And Caesar is going to have to get busy around the globe. It’s gonna hurt–a lot. But since the bishops have shown they cannot trusted, that’s how it is. God uses the rod of the Assyrian when Israel is stiff-necked.