When Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò called on Pope Francis to resign last summer for allegedly covering up the sexual crimes of the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, it was “like an earthquake for the Church.” That’s how Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo, a former Vatican official and a longtime consultant for CBS News, described Viganò’s “testimony,” an 11-page Read more
In an exclusive conversation with America, conducted Oct. 11, Cardinal Donald Wuerl spoke about the reasons he asked the pope to accept his resignation, stating that “what is important now is to be able to move beyond the questions of doubt, fallibility and not concentrating on myself but helping this church to get to a Read more
US Catholics’ confidence in Pope Francis’s ability to handle the sex abuse crisis besetting the Church is down by a two-to-one margin, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The survey results released this week show: 30% of American Catholic adults say Francis is doing an “excellent” or a “good” job addressing the issue Read more
The publication of the “testimony” of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Vatican nuncio to the United States, is an unprecedented moment in modern church history—and not just because of his demand that Pope Francis resign. The eleven-page document, crafted and published by Viganò with the help of sympathetic Catholic journalists while the pope was Read more
There is a reason that Pepsi never attacked Coca-Cola head-on, or vice-versa. They did not want to “ruin the brand,” in the parlance of marketing. They did not want people turning against the concept of soda altogether. So, instead, each company adopted clever ways of situating their project in the consumer’s mind, and they even Read more
Demands from a Vatican archbishop for the Pope’s resignation and America’s clergy sexual abuse scandal were on the agenda when Pope Francis met with several US bishops yesterday for talks. Read more
One pope was a father of 10 through multiple mistresses, a man who purchased the papacy with mule-loads of silver. It is said that Alexander VI, the most debauched of the Borgia pontiffs, elected in 1492, even had an affair with one of his daughters. Another pope contracted syphilis during his reign — a “disease Read more
Saint John Paul II died in April 2005 and can no longer speak. The Pope Emeritus Benedict, his collaborators explain, has absolutely no intention of saying anything about the whole thing. Pope Francis invited journalists to read what was written by the former nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò in his j’accuse that tries to involve three Read more
While Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò makes a number of accusations against former and current Vatican officials in his 11-page letter, there is only one he aims at Pope Francis. Vigano alleges Pope Francis knew former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had “corrupted generations of seminarians and priests” but nonetheless decided to lift sanctions. Sanctions that included “a Read more
At 9:30 a.m. last Wednesday, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano showed up at the Rome apartment of a conservative Vatican reporter with a simple clerical collar, a Rocky Mountains baseball cap and an explosive story to tell. Archbishop Viganò, the former chief Vatican diplomat in the United States, spent the morning working shoulder to shoulder with Read more