Vatican financial is reform going in the right direction, Pell says
- Jan 15, 2021
One of the McCarrick report’s few living protagonists is Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, John Paul’s longtime personal secretary, who was mentioned 45 times in the document.
Prominent leaders of the Catholic Church in America point to a “culture of clericalism” that led to laicized ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick rising through the ranks of the church despite decades-long accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse.
“Believing that the allegations had already been reviewed and rejected by Pope John Paul II, and well aware that McCarrick was active during the papacy of Benedict XVI, Pope Francis did not see the need to alter the approach that had been adopted in prior years,” the report states.
Thinking in terms of bad guys and smoking guns is often a prescription for over-simplifying a more complicated story.
A few steps from the Vatican, on the 42nd anniversary of the election of St. John Paul II, a small exhibit opened to celebrate the Polish-born pope, but also a father-daughter team of photographers who helped document his pontificate.
A new statue that depicts the late pope St. John Paul II throwing a boulder into red water has provoked debate in his native Poland and revived memories of a 1999 Italian sculpture that showed him crushed under a meteorite, to which the new work was intended as a counter-statement.