Pope Francis on civil unions: Another step toward common ground with the LGBTQ movement
Underlying the pope’s support for gay civil unions is his own long history decrying homophobia and calling for LGBTQ people to be treated with respect and dignity.
Pope Francis waves at the end of his Angelus noon prayer from the window of his studio overlooking St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Oct. 25, 2020. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

October 29, 2020
By Alphonso David, James Martin


(RNS) — In a significant step for the Catholic Church, Pope Francis signaled his support for civil unions for same-sex couples in a documentary released last week. This is the first time Pope Francis has so clearly and so publicly recognized the value of civil legal protections for same-sex couples.

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis (then Jorge Mario Bergoglio) made similar statements in private. Later, as pope, he mentioned these legal protections in subtle ways in books, interviews and press conferences, but never as clearly as in the new documentary, “Francesco,” which includes comments on civil unions taken from an interview with a Mexican journalist last year.

The movement for LGBTQ equality has an especially complicated relationship with the Catholic Church, which has only rarely affirmed LGBTQ people’s dignity and their rights to legal protections. History is rife with examples of clergy and laypersons persecuting, rejecting and marginalizing LGBTQ people, even within the church — at times, in violation of the church’s own teaching of love, mercy and compassion.

And while history is also full of stories of radical love and inclusion by Catholic leaders and laypeople (the church’s medical care for those living with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s is one of these many untold stories), senior church leaders’ opposition toward, and minimal advocacy on behalf of, the LGBTQ community is a tragic legacy.

RELATED: Six things you need to know about Pope Francis and gay civil unions

Even today, we see church leaders in Poland declare LGBTQ people as a “rainbow plague,” comparing the movement for LGBTQ equality to Nazism. In Uganda, some bishops have sided with repressive laws that criminalize same-sex relations.

The pope’s comment, then, is but one step in the long and often arduous journey for treating LGBTQ people with the “respect, compassion and sensitivity” that the Catechism asks, and the love and mercy that Jesus demands.

Pope Francis delivers his message on the occasion of the weekly general audience in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican on Oct. 21, 2020. Francis endorsed same-sex civil unions for the first time as pope while being interviewed for the feature-length documentary “Francesco,” which premiered at the Rome Film Festival. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Many LGBTQ people today would agree with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s famous comment that civil unions are nothing more than a “skim milk” version of marriage. But, though small, this step by the pope helps to establish common ground between the LGBTQ movement and the church, however tenuous.

That common ground is a mutual understanding of our shared humanity and dignity.

Underlying Francis’ statement is his own long history decrying homophobia and calling for LGBTQ people to be treated with respect and dignity. Signaling support for civil protections is but an extension of his overall pastoral ministry to LGBTQ people, which is attempting to reconcile church teaching on human dignity and nondiscrimination with church practice.

It’s worth noting that this is the first pope ever to use the word “gay” publicly. Francis has often spoken of the need for LGBTQ children to be welcomed by their parents and families and has reminded his followers that Jesus Christ would never say, “Go away because you’re homosexual.” His papacy is surely the most open to LGBTQ people in the history of the church.

Catholics in the United States and around the world are increasingly coming to recognize that LGBTQ people belong in the church and that they deserve to be treated with the utmost respect in their homes, in their families, in their faith communities and in the public square.

Francis’ most recent statement may mark a moment for all faith leaders and people of faith to further reflect on how their own actions are advancing — or working against — greater progress and inclusion.

Just a few weeks ago, Francis published his third encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,” a papal letter addressing pressing moral and theological questions. Rooted in the parable of the good Samaritan, the letter is a summons to affirm and defend the dignity of all by creating more just and inclusive societies. Francis reflects on the underlying imperative of the parable, an ethic of justice and inclusion rooted in our common humanity and the need to defend the common good.

He wrote: “The parable does not indulge in abstract moralizing, nor is its message merely social and ethical. It speaks to us of an essential and often forgotten aspect of our common humanity: we were created for a fulfillment that can only be found in love. We cannot be indifferent to suffering; we cannot allow anyone to go through life as an outcast. Instead we should feel indignant, challenged to emerge from our comfortable isolation and to be changed by our contact with human suffering. That is the meaning of dignity.”

LGBTQ people deserve to be treated with respect, compassion and sensitivity, and deserve to be welcomed and protected. On this, the LGBTQ movement and the pope can find common ground. Leaders within all churches and in the public square can see in Francis’ words an invitation to defend the rights and dignity of the LGBTQ community and to create more just and inclusive societies for all human beings.

(Alphonso David is the president of the Human Rights Campaign. The Rev. James Martin is an American Jesuit priest and writer. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of Religion News Service.)

Barrett’s faith views go beyond even many pro-life Americans’ beliefs
Barrett’s Catholicism strictly follows the Magisterium’s teachings that are at odds with most Americans' pragmatic philosophical leanings.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett speaks after President Donald Trump announced Barrett as his nominee to the Supreme Court, in the Rose Garden at the White House, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

October 26, 2020
By Kathy Rudy


(RNS) — Judge Amy Coney Barrett holds that she can compartmentalize her religious convictions and make judgments on constitutional grounds only.

“My present church affiliation or my religious beliefs would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge,” she told the Senate Judiciary Committee at her confirmation hearing in 2017 when she joined the 7th Circuit Court, a theme she continued in the answers she gave the committee in the past days.

But legal rulings on topics such as abortion, stem cell research, in vitro fertilization and birth control are colored by how we understand and define not just the morality but the practical reality of these issues. And as Barrett takes her seat on the Supreme Court, it’s worth considering that her understanding of abortion, birth control and reproduction differs even from most pro-life Americans.

Pro-life churches in America, including mainline Protestant and evangelical congregations, have pragmatic answers to moral questions surrounding abortion and sex. For them, contraception is acceptable, especially within marriage.

Similarly, although they view abortion as wrong, use of fetal tissue in medicine is a different matter. If science can use stem cells from fetal tissue to develop treatments for diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, it feels like a silver lining to a dark cloud.

One last example: If a couple can’t conceive naturally, these churches support couples seeking help from fertility clinics, which offer in vitro fertilization, accomplished by implanting an embryo.

When many Protestant pro-lifers say they oppose abortion, they mean the removal of the fetus by scraping (D&C and D&E), saline injection or suction. The “morning after pill” is seen as an excellent contraceptive alternative to these forms of abortion.

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett listens during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 14, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool)

These American Protestants’ views rest on the legal concept of proportionalism, which claims we should do the best thing for the most people without diminishing the rights of any individual. Based on Enlightenment philosophies of liberalism and utilitarianism, proportionalism seems like second nature to most Americans. Look around, see what your choices are, and pick the best option available.

The governing body of the Roman Catholic Church, the Magisterium, rejects proportionalism, along with the morning after pill, in vitro fertilization and all the other above examples. It builds on philosophies that precede the Enlightenment by more than 1,000 years; liberalism and utilitarianism were not even invented when Catholic moral theory was first being written.

The early church fathers, and theologians throughout the Middle Ages, sought concrete, consistent rules that were easily applied. In a world where few people could read, and there was no mass communication, the Magisterium needed a concise way to teach about sex and birth. Priests were trained that sex and reproduction are intrinsically linked and that sex should lead to the possibility of procreation.

Even though new technologies have brought us to new moral dilemmas, this ancient teaching remains. The most recent papal teaching on the subject, Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, reaffirms it, stating that “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children.”

In this view, all sex must be open to reproduction, and all reproduction must come as a product of sex. The church’s teaching rejects all forms of sex that do not relate to children — including use of condoms, the morning after pill and homosexuality. In this view, life begins at conception, and anything that disrupts or prevents that conception is a mortal sin. And because in vitro fertilization does not entail sexual intercourse, for strict Catholics, it, too, is immoral.

Many American Catholics have moved away from the most conservative teachings of the Magisterium and have chosen to ignore teachings about such things as birth control and homosexuality. This is a difference between Joe Biden and Amy Coney Barrett. Biden’s Catholicism reflects American ethics. Barrett’s Catholicism follows the Magisterium’s teachings to the letter.

This brings us to the question of embryonic stem cells in American medicine. Protestants, evangelicals and even some Catholics, such as Biden, widely accept using embryonic stem cell lines produced by the tissue of an aborted fetus to advance science and health knowledge. Most Americans believe life begins at implantation, which happens a few days after fertilization, when the fetus attaches itself to the uterine wall.

The Vatican teaches that, because life begins at conception, embryos, whether frozen or aborted, are human beings who cannot be used for research of any kind. Thus, Regeneron, part of the cocktail given to President Trump for his recent COVID-19 infection, would be outlawed by Catholic social teaching because it was created using aborted fetal stem cell lines.

Indeed, without access to pliable and flexible fetal stem cells and their lines, most medical research would come to a halt.

Barrett may well live up to her vow to compartmentalize her faith. If she succeeds, she’ll no doubt owe it in part to the unprecedented scrutiny her votes and opinions on faith-related issues will receive from a nation that disagrees with her stance.

(Kathy Rudy is a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University and the author of “Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: Moral Diversity in the Abortion Debate.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of Religion News Service.)

Opinion
William Barr and the politics of death

We are not executing the ‘worst of the worst,’ as some may believe, but the poorest of the poor, and disproportionately people of color.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr speaks during a roundtable discussion Oct. 15, 2020, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

November 18, 2020
By Shane Claiborne

(RNS) — This week the United States will pass a quarter of a million lives lost to coronavirus, even as our courageous nurses and doctors risk their own lives to try to save other people. Every loss is wrenching. While this is going on, the Trump administration is going out of its way to bring more death in the middle of the death by carrying out federal executions amid the pandemic.

Until this year, the United States went 17 years without a single federal execution. In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, we have had more executions than in the past 50 years combined. No president, Republican or Democrat, has executed this many people since Harry Truman was in the White House. And even Truman didn’t kill this many people in a single year.

Even with just over 60 days left in power, this administration has set three more execution dates.

Some televangelists and religious pundits sing the praises of Donald Trump as a pro-life president, citing his appointment of anti-abortion judges, but the rash of federal executions is one more reminder that Trump and Attorney General William Barr are anything but pro-life.

RELATED: Federal executions are one more example of Trump administration overreach

Barr, a professing Catholic, was given an award at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in September. He executed someone the day before and the day after receiving the award. No one missed the irony. As Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, said, “With this award for Mr. Barr, the ‘National Catholic Prayer Breakfast’ has become a twisted halftime show between executions.”

Barr’s push for the death penalty is in direct opposition to current Catholic teaching and Pope Francis’ passionate call, most recently in his newest encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” for an end to the death penalty. “The death penalty is inadmissible and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide,” the pope wrote.


Attorney General William Barr speaks during a tour of a federal prison in Edgefield, S.C, on July 8, 2019. The Justice Department has carried out executions of federal death row inmates for the first time since 2003. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)

The three upcoming executions are one more reminder of how broken the system is.

Orlando Hall is set to be executed on Thursday (Nov. 19). An African American man convicted by an all-white jury in a trial riddled with racial bias, he is one of 22 African American inmates on federal death row — out of 54 men in all. That’s about par for death row prisoners nationwide: Though African Americans make up about 12% of the U.S. population, they account for nearly half of our death row population and over a third of our executions.

One of the clearest determinants of who gets the death penalty is not the atrocity of the crime, but the race of the victim. In a bombshell new study on racial disparities, the Death Penalty Information Center noted that even though about half of all murder victims are African American, 80% of new death sentences in 2019 were imposed in cases where the victim was white.

We are not executing the “worst of the worst,” as some may believe, but the poorest of the poor, and disproportionately people of color. It is precisely the states that held onto slavery the longest, furthermore, that continue to hold onto the death penalty. The federal government would rather go backward than forward.

The next person scheduled to die after Orlando Hall is Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row and the first woman in nearly 70 years to be executed by the United States. A victim of rape by a family member, Montgomery was pressured at age 17 into an engagement with her stepbrother and was forcibly sterilized. She nevertheless takes full responsibility for the her horrific crime and is being treated for mental illness and trauma after her life of sexual and physical abuse.

It’s sickening to think that the best we can think of doing as a nation is to kill her, yet not only is that the plan, but the feds gave her only 54 days’ notice before her execution — the normal period is 120 days, to allow for appeals. Both of her lawyers have now tested positive for COVID-19 as a result of travel related to the execution’s rushed timing.

On Dec. 10, two days after Montgomery’s scheduled execution, Brandon Bernard will face execution for a crime he was convicted of when he was 18 years old, in a trial tarnished by prosecutorial misconduct, including concealing vital information from jurors. A majority of the surviving trial jurors now say they don’t want that death verdict carried out.

More than 10,000 bishops, pastors and people of faith have signed a petition to stop these executions.

This recent surge of federal executions goes against the trend in the states, which have been moving steadily away from the death penalty. Half of the 14 executions in 2020 were carried out by the federal government.

Almost every year, a new state abolishes the death penalty, bringing the number of executions and new death penalty sentences to a 40-year low. With Colorado becoming the seventh state to legislatively abolish capital punishment last year, 22 states have no capital punishment provision on the books at all. Several more don’t use the death penalty, even though they may still have it on the books.

We’ve hit a tipping point, and we are likely to be the generation to end the death penalty.

If so, the United States would join 106 other countries, more than half the world, that have abolished the death penalty — up from 16 in 1977. As it is, the U.S. government finds itself in the company of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Iraq, the five deadliest countries in the world when it comes to executions. The U.S. is No. 7.

Let’s dedicate ourselves to getting on the right side of history. Let’s do all we can to stop these last three executions of 2020. Let’s tell Barr that our values and our politics should point toward a future with less death, not more.

(Shane Claiborne is an activist, author and co-director of Red Letter Christians. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of Religion News Service.)

It’s time to rescue the ‘pro-life’ label from anti-abortion activists
The 'pro-life' term was once a moral call to arms, but it has become a mere political checkbox

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A sign held during the 2017 March for Life in Washington.

 Photo by James McNellis/Creative Commons

November 2, 2020
By Jonathan Merritt

(RNS) — Sister Mary Traupman is a staunchly pro-life Roman Catholic nun, but she’s casting her vote for pro-choice Democrats and Joe Biden in this election — because of her pro-life convictions, not in spite of them.

In a recent letter to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Traupman argued that being pro-life must expand to include “the lives of those already born,” including migrants, poor people, the elderly, trafficking survivors and victims of racism.

Of Trump’s record she wrote, “Ripping born babies from their mothers’ arms, lifting regulations to preserve our environment for future generations, implementing tax cuts to benefit only a segment of our society, ignoring a health threat to hundreds of thousands of lives, robbing the poor of health care … these are not pro-life policies.”

Traupman’s defection may strike some as contradictory, but her logic is increasingly common among a chorus of pro-lifers who say they have awoken to the way conservative activists have transformed abortion into a single-issue trump card that renders other life-and-death matters irrelevant.

They are championing human flourishing “from the womb to the tomb” and are ready to take back the “pro-life” label from anti-abortion activists.

RELATED: Abortion over immigration: Trump’s pro-life policies remain paramount for many Latino Catholics

In his 2016 book “Defenders of the Unborn,” historian Daniel Williams traces the birth of the American pro-life movement to the 1930s and ’40s, when physician-led groups began arguing for the repeal of abortion laws. At the time, resistance was largely limited to Catholic political advocacy groups.

But in the 1960s, anti-abortion advocates searched for a banner capacious enough to mainstream the movement and powerful enough to polarize the electorate. They settled on “pro-life,” a term considered by many to be a “marketing masterstroke.” The term cloaked the movement with gleaming positivity, yoked it with moral heft and reframed its opposition as affirmative.

As Quartz’s Annalisa Merelli recently wrote, “The success of the label is largely due to its ability to frame the issue not as standing against something (a woman’s choice) but in favor of it (life).”

The new definition of “life” not only stuck, it spread. Soon, phrases like “the sanctity of life” and “right to life” flooded the public square, and the movement’s ranks swelled.

Before this rebrand, many social conservatives, and even a sizable portion of evangelical Christians, supported abortion rights, believing that human life began at birth rather than conception.

The Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions in 1971, 1974 and 1976 affirming a woman’s right to choose to protect her physical or even emotional wellbeing. But in time, the new label persuaded evangelicals, Mormons and other social conservatives that opposition to abortion was not just important, but the most important moral issue of the day.

As a political issue, abortion did not break neatly across party lines during most of the 20th century. As Williams noted, “Prior to the mid-1970s, no one would have associated the GOP with opposition to abortion.”

The rhetorical move was so effective that it left progressives scrambling to find their own label. They settled on “pro-choice,” an inferior brand that lacks the emotion of “pro-life.”

Yet “pro-life” had its own problems. Pro-choicers claimed the label truncated the range of its core concern — human life — to legal protections for the unborn. Barnett “Barney” Frank, the Massachusetts congressman, was not completely off-base when he quipped in 1981 that pro-lifers believe “life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

These days, some pro-lifers are awakening to the truth behind Frank’s barb.

The Rev. James Martin, a prominent Jesuit priest and bestselling author (and a friend), has written that he “cannot deny that I see a child in the womb, from the moment of his or her conception, as a creation of God, deserving of our respect, protection and love.” But he believes that the same vision — and the same advocacy — should apply to at-risk LGBTQ youth, inmates on death row, refugees seeking asylum and impoverished and homeless people, for whom protection rarely appears on pro-lifers’ political punch list.

In a recent YouTube video, Martin said, “The problem with the term ‘pro-life’ is that it’s often used just to talk about the unborn, but pro-life means being pro-all lives, not just pro-some lives, because all lives are sacred.”

Once upon a time, public comments like these might land a Catholic priest or nun in hot water, but Martin gets by with a little help from his friends in the Vatican. In Pope Francis’ 2015 speech to the U.S. Congress, the pontiff said that Christians have a “responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development.”

The “pro-life” term that once so deftly reframed the abortion debate, in short, has now become its Achilles heel. It threatens to splinter a movement that has remained remarkably unified for nearly half a century.

The “pro-life” term was once a moral call to arms, but it’s now a mere political checkbox. Opposition to abortion is a non-negotiable for many conservatives, and a number of evangelical friends proudly admit to being “single-issue voters” who support only pro-life candidates. Other moral and political positions don’t factor into their decisions.

This faulty political ideology ignores, trivializes and even disregards dozens of issues of profound human consequence, such as police brutality, environmental degradation, state-sanctioned torture, unjust wars, alleviation of poverty and the mistreatment of minority groups.

Lately, some prominent evangelicals are reclaiming the pro-life label. In 2016, evangelical theologian and author Ron Sider penned an article in the Christian magazine Plough, arguing that the Bible’s political vision is “completely pro-life,” acknowledging that children are persons “from the moment of conception,” but it also points to “other ways that human lives are destroyed.

“Why, I wondered, did many pro-life leaders fail to support programs designed to reduce starvation among the world’s children?” Sider asked. “Why did others oppose government funding for research into a cure for AIDS? Why did an important pro-life senator fight to save unborn babies only to defend government subsidies for tobacco products, which cause six million deaths around the globe each year?”

Sider said pro-lifers should reject single-issue voting and instead weigh a candidate’s position on matters such as capital punishment, racism, environmental degradation and global poverty, as well as abortion. That same year, Sider proclaimed in Christianity Today that he would be voting for Hillary Clinton, even though he had not publicly endorsed a political candidate in 44 years.

Just this month, Sider joined an impressive collection of prominent Christian leaders to launch “Pro-life Evangelicals for Biden.” Their mission statement is a concise two-sentence summary that claps with moral thunder: “As pro-life evangelicals, we disagree with Vice President Biden and the Democratic platform on the issue of abortion. But we believe a biblically shaped commitment to the sanctity of human life compels us to a consistent ethic of life that affirms the sanctity of human life from beginning to end.”

Another co-founder of the group, former evangelical megachurch pastor Joel Hunter, said that he and other members oppose abortion as vehemently as ever, but, “We want to make sure the pro-life agenda is expanded beyond birth.”

Hunter also noted that overturning Roe v. Wade, long a goal of the pro-life movement, will only serve to return America to a dark past when women sought out and sometimes died from self-induced and black-market abortions. Instead, he said, pro-lifers should focus on reducing the occurrence of abortion by reducing the perceived need for them.

This can be accomplished through more access to contraception, tax credits for adoption, increased funding for low-income women who wish to bring their children to term and comprehensive sexual education. Conservatives shy away from this “abortion reduction agenda,” but some Democrats don’t: the strategy was once championed by President Barack Obama.

RELATED: What does the Bible really say about abortion?

I am a churchgoing Christian who graduated from Liberty University and an evangelical seminary. I was raised by a megachurch pastor and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention who proudly describes himself politically as “to the right of Ronald Reagan.”

My mother, whom I love dearly and respect deeply, has been a stalwart Trump supporter since the famous escalator moment at Trump Tower. I’ve voted almost exclusively for Republican candidates in federal elections ever since I turned 18, and I still consider myself “pro-life.”

But these days my pro-life convictions are leading me to vote mostly for Democrats.

I have come to agree with Sister Joan Chittister, the Catholic nun and peace activist, who recently said, “I do not believe that just because you are opposed to abortion that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed.”

Chittister’s coup de grace handily exploits conservatives’ shortcomings, arguing they are often not pro-life, but “pro-birth.” Some may dismiss witticisms like this as a tiny crack in the movement’s dam, but the fracture looks mightier than ever, and water is leaking.

If the Republican Party follows its path of platforming pro-life candidates who show little regard for post-birth life, the dribble may become a deluge that could sweep away one of the most powerful political movements of the last half-century.

US Catholic bishops’ response to McCarrick report is sad but predictable

At their fall meeting, the American Catholic bishops failed to communicate that they understood the startling report's implications.
Archbishop José Horacio Gómez of Los Angeles speaks at a 2020 virtual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Video screengrab

November 20, 2020
By Thomas Reese


(RNS) — The discussion of the Vatican report on ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick by the U.S. bishops at their annual fall meeting was sad but predictable — sad because the bishops failed to communicate that they understood the report’s implications; predictable in that some bishops defended John Paul II against the report’s finding that the pontiff shared culpability in the McCarrick case.

The report, released Nov. 10, acknowledged that despite it being known that McCarrick was sleeping with seminarians, he was promoted to the Archdiocese of Washington and made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II.

It would have been better for the bishops to acknowledge the pope’s failure and argue that if he were alive today, he would be apologizing for his mistakes. In their 45-minute public discussion of the report, followed by 90 minutes of talking privately about it, they did neither.

Bishops are reluctant to criticize John Paul’s record of appointing and promoting bishops because most of them were appointed the same way by the same pope. To acknowledge his failures would open the possibility that they, too, were selected through a defective process that stressed loyalty over other factors.

“It can’t be a bad system; it selected me,” would be the attitude of most bishops.

Only Bishop Mark Brennan of Wheeling-Charleston suggested that the process should be improved. He proposed giving 30 to 60 days at the end of the process for people to comment on a candidate before his appointment was finalized. That way, he said, “We might avoid appointing someone to the episcopacy who did not deserve it.”

The tone of the meeting was set by Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the papal nuncio, who did not even mention McCarrick’s name in his address to the bishops. What Americans needed to hear instead from the pope’s representative was an apology for the failure of his predecessors and the Vatican hierarchy, who not only did not deal with McCarrick’s abuse but promoted him.

The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, did better in introducing the discussion by saying that it “shows that the tragic outcome was not the result of a single failure but rather resulted from multiple failures across many years.”

Those failures were fed by clericalism, he acknowledged. The culture of clericalism limited the church’s “ability to discuss abuse with honesty and integrity,” he said. “It left other brave voices feeling isolated when they called out the sins of abuse.”

Gomez acknowledged the failures of the past without naming names — for example the three New Jersey bishops, all now deceased, who knew about McCarrick’s abuse of seminarians and said nothing.

In this Nov. 14, 2011 file photo, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick prays during the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual fall assembly in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

But Gomez stressed spiritual reform, rather than institutional reform, because he believes “we have already made important steps addressing the institutional failings that led to this sad tragedy of Theodore McCarrick.”

Gomez urged the bishops to have a personal relationship with Jesus in prayer. This relationship would then be the foundation of their relationship to each other in the common task of building the kingdom of God.

“Individually and collectively, we apologize for the trauma caused by those who commit abuse and any church leader who fails to respond with compassion and justice,” he said.

He expressed “deep sorrow for the victims and survivors of abuse” and said the bishops are committed “to holding the church and each one of us as bishops accountable on the ways we have failed in our responsibilities to our Lord and to the people of God.” He said the bishops were ready “to continue on our path of repentance, purification and reform.”

Likewise, Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore called on the bishops to spend an hour each day in prayer and reparation before the Blessed Sacrament, together with some form of fasting or penance each week.

But while acknowledging the need for spiritual reform, some bishops called for more accountability and institutional reform.

Pointing to the gifts of money McCarrick gave to clerics and organizations, which have led to suspicions that he was buying influence, Bishop Michael Olson of Fort Worth called for the recipients to be named.

“We have to give an accounting to the faithful for this, we have to respond to their questions,” he said. This is necessary “for the continuing of our conversion, for the continuing of the purification of our church and its transparency.”

Bishop W. Shawn McKnight of Jefferson City argued that reports like the McCarrick report should come as a matter of routine when accusations are made rather than only when they are forced by public demand. He also urged a greater role for the laity, particularly those with relevant skills, in conducting investigations.

The peculiarities of the McCarrick case prompted calls for looking at the abuse with new eyes. Noting that the abuse of adults and seminarians is often overlooked, Archbishop Bernard Hebda of St. Paul and Minneapolis called for the bishops “to reach out to our priests and seminarians to allow them to speak about their experiences and about whatever it might be that would prohibit someone from coming forward with allegations.”

Others bemoaned the division among the bishops the case has caused. Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago cited the letter of Archbishop Carlo Vigano accusing the pope of ignoring McCarrick’s abuse and calling for his resignation.

“We have to make sure that we never again have a situation where anyone from our conference is taking sides in this with the Holy Father or challenging him or even being with those who are calling for his resignation,” Cupich said. “That kind of thing really has to cease.”

Cupich also called on the bishops to meet with survivors of abuse, to encourage them to come forward.

Victims “were intimidated; they thought they would not be listened to because of the power structure and so on,” he said. “The more that we listen to victims and make it public that we are meeting with victims, as the Holy Father does on a regular basis, the word will get out there that we are on the side of victims. We will learn to have our hearts moved the more we listen to victims.”

It is a mistake to focus on either spiritual or institutional reform in the absence of the other. Both are needed to deal with the tragedy of sexual abuse of minors or adults. The report requires much more study and discussion by the U.S. bishops and the whole church in order to discern the correct path into a better future.

Worse than bungling, McCarrick report shows Vatican failed to take abuse seriously
The Vatican report on McCarrick shows that something worse than mere incompetence was at work in the Vatican’s failure: clericalism.
Washington’s archbishop, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, listens as Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wuerl speaks at a news conference announcing Wuerl as the choice of Pope Benedict XVI to succeed McCarrick as leader of the Roman Catholic community in the nation’s capital, at the Archdiocese of Washington, on May 16, 2006. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

November 11, 2020
By Thomas Reese


(RNS) — The sex abuse scandal involving former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has always been disturbing in at least two ways: the alleged abuse itself and the idea that an abuser could rise so high in the Catholic hierarchy.

The failure of the Vatican vetting process to take seriously multiple allegations over decades suggests incompetence; appointing the subject of those allegations to be the cardinal archbishop of Washington, as McCarrick was, is equivalent to the FBI clearing an enemy agent for a U.S. Cabinet post.

Worst of all, the Vatican report on McCarrick, released Tuesday (Nov. 10), reveals that at least three bishops knew of his abuse and did nothing. This is a sign that clericalism was at work as much as incompetence. 

It makes one wonder how many other accusations against bishops were treated in the same way. 

The report also reveals how difficult it is to hold abusers accountable without the testimony of their victims. Victims must be honored, respected and encouraged to come forward if the church wants to root out abusers. 

The child abuse occurred when McCarrick was a young priest in the 1970s, but the victims did not come forward until almost 50 years later. Once victims came forward, Pope Francis quickly instructed Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, to investigate. When the allegations were found convincing, the pope made McCarrick resign as a cardinal and dismissed him from the priesthood in 2018.

While McCarrick’s abuse of minors was not uncovered until the papacy of Pope Francis, allegations of McCarrick sleeping with young adults, including seminarians, appeared when he was being vetted to be archbishop of Washington. Prior to that, the report says, “no credible information emerged suggesting that he had engaged in any misconduct.”

The allegations were focused on his time as bishop of Metuchen (1981-1986) and archbishop of Newark (1986-2000). 

Granted that he was already sleeping with seminarians in Metuchen, it is shocking that nothing turned up when he was vetted for Newark. Either the wrong people were asked, or they did not report his bed sharing. Once again clericalism triumphed. 

Before he was elevated to the Archdiocese of Washington, anonymous letters accused McCarrick of pedophilia with “nephews,” a term he publicly used for minors and seminarians with whom he was close. By this time, the report states, McCarrick “was known to have shared his bed” with young adult men and seminarians.

But no victims and only one witness of sexual misconduct had come forward. The witness, a priest, was discredited by his own abuse of minors.

Cardinal John O’Connor of New York warned Pope John Paul II against advancing McCarrick to Washington. Archbishop Battista Re in the Secretariat of State and Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves, head of the Congregation for Bishops, also opposed his promotion.

Even though they didn’t believe the allegations had been substantiated, they worried they would become public and hurt the church. Sadly, none of the documents express great concern for the victims. 

These misgivings stopped McCarrick’s advancement at first, but John Paul changed his mind after receiving a letter from McCarrick defending himself. Re, who succeeded Neves as head of the Congregation for Bishops, also changed his mind, probably because he knew John Paul wanted it.

John Paul simply could not believe the accusations against someone he had known and befriended since the mid-1970s. He also respected McCarrick’s outstanding work for the church. 

Failing to properly investigate rumors about McCarrick was a sign of both incompetence and clericalism.

The report says the Vatican attempted to investigate the rumors by contacting bishops in New Jersey, rather than hiring a trained investigator. Although the investigation confirmed “that McCarrick had shared a bed with young men but did not indicate with certainty that McCarrick had engaged in any sexual misconduct,” the Vatican found a way to ignore it. 

The report acknowledges that three of the four New Jersey “bishops provided inaccurate and incomplete information to the Holy See regarding McCarrick’s sexual conduct with young adults.”

Bishop Edward Hughes, McCarrick’s successor in Metuchen, did not pass on reports from seminarians and priests who told him they had been abused by McCarrick. Bishops James McHugh of Camden and John Smith of Trenton even witnessed McCarrick sexually touching a seminarian at a dinner party but never reported it, the Vatican said.

Without negative testimony from bishops or victims, “the accusations against the prelate,” as one nuncio concluded, “are neither definitively proven nor completely groundless.”

The refusal of these bishops to come forward is outrageous. They are deceased so they cannot be punished, but their names should be removed from any church facilities honoring them. It was their support, as well as many bishops’, that weighed heavily in McCarrick’s appointment to Washington.

Even without further investigation, frequently sharing a bed with young men should have stopped McCarrick’s advancement. His habit of sleeping with seminarians and other young men screamed for investigation. McCarrick himself acknowledged that he had “imprudently” shared a bed with young men but denied any sexual activity, but the fact that no one had accused him of actual sexual misconduct is irrelevant. 

If John Paul and the Vatican knew that McCarrick had a habit of sharing his bed with seminarians, his career should have been over. Even without sexual contact, this was grossly inappropriate.

The Vatican appears to play down his misconduct by noting that his victims were adults, not minors, but the fact that they were seminarians makes it an abuse of power. If he had simply picked up willing young men in a bar, that could be forgiven. His preying on those under his authority disqualified him from being a bishop. Again, one wonders how many other bishops received similar clemency. 

The willingness of John Paul to advance McCarrick shows the corrupting influence of clericalism. 

John Paul had a blind spot when it came to clergy sex abuse because he had seen how Nazi and communist governments in Poland would use such accusations against good priests. He could not believe that McCarrick, who had done so much for the church and had been a loyal friend, could be an abuser. He also refused to listen to complaints against the Rev. Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ.

Others also failed to uncover McCarrick’s infractions. Reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Star-Ledger in Newark had heard the rumors about McCarrick but could never get anyone to go on the record. Even the federal government missed the signs when investigating him for a security clearance. 

While it does not answer all my questions, the McCarrick report is a huge step forward in transparency. It relates in great detail, with copious quotes from letters and document, the process by which McCarrick was vetted.

While the church has made great strides in protecting children, the McCarrick scandal indicates the need to also protect seminarians.

For example, every seminarian in the church should be asked at least once a year whether he has experienced sexual abuse or harassment. This interview should be done by someone independent of the seminary and the diocese.

The church also needs to take more seriously anonymous accusations and rumors of misconduct. While no one should be convicted on flimsy evidence, independent trained investigators should determine the facts when possible.

Francis should be congratulated for demanding this report. It needs careful study so the church can learn what additional reforms are needed.

McCarrick report shifts views of Pope John Paul II in a polarized Catholic Church
Detailing how Pope John Paul II ignored accusations against McCarrick to make him Archbishop of Washington and elevate him to cardinal, the report raises questions about the legacy of Poland's first Catholic pontiff

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FILE - In this Feb. 23, 2001 file photo, U.S. Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, D.C., shakes hands with Pope John Paul II during the General Audience with the newly appointed cardinals in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican. McCarrick was one of the three Americans on a record list of 44 new cardinals who were elevated in a ceremony at the Vatican on Feb. 21, 2001. (AP Photo/Massimo Sambucetti, File)
November 16, 2020
By Claire Giangravé

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — For more than a week at the end of October, massive demonstrations swamped the streets of major cities in Poland as women marched against a court decision increasing abortion restrictions in the country.

The demonstrators, accusing the Roman Catholic Church of being a partner with Poland’s increasingly authoritarian conservative government, also showed their anger by disrupting Masses and invading cathedrals dressed in the red dresses and white bonnets of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Signs recalling sexual abuse by Catholic clergy also became commonplace at the demonstrations.

The criticism, almost unimaginable just a few years ago in a country that counts itself the most Catholic nation in Europe, has been received by some as a wake-up call for the Church.

“If the Polish bishops don’t realize that Poland, like the rest of the West, is mission territory, and if they don’t call their clergy and people to live the New Evangelization, Poland in 20 years could be the new Italy: a country with a visible facade of Catholic culture and history but a rather weak faith beneath,” Catholic commentator George Weigel told Religion News Service on Friday (Nov. 13).

RELATED: McCarrick scandal shows why popes, like John Paul, should not be canonized

Another blow to the Polish church came just days later, as the Vatican released its long-awaited report on the handling of the sexual abuse case of ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Detailing how Pope John Paul II failed to act on the accusations against McCarrick to make him Archbishop of Washington and elevate him to cardinal, the report raises questions about the legacy of Poland’s first Catholic pontiff, its most recent saint and a hero of its struggle to escape the influence of Communism in the 1970s and ’80s.

Washington’s archbishop, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, listens as Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wu.erl speaks at a news conference announcing Wuerl as the choice of Pope Benedict XVI to succeed McCarrick as leader of the Roman Catholic community in the nation’s capital, at the Archdiocese of Washington, on May 16, 2006 (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

“The legacy of John Paul II is in jeopardy now,” said Frederic Martel, journalist and author of “In the Closet of the Vatican,” a 2019 book that delved into the gay culture within the Vatican.

“Fighting Communism in Eastern Europe was a more important ideological goal than combating sexual abuse for John Paul II,” Martel added.

In addition to the McCarrick report, a Polish documentary that aired last week suggested that Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, John Paul II’s secretary, covered up numerous cases of sexual abuse in Poland and elsewhere. The McCarrick report mentions Dziwisz over 40 times.

In recent days, the fallout from the report has revived arguments that John Paul was made a saint too soon, only nine years after his death in 2005. There is no way to decanonize a saint in the Catholic Church, though feast days can be removed from the calendar.

According to the investigation, then-Archbishop of New York Cardinal John O’Connor and the Vatican envoy to the United States, Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan, collected the evidence and testimonies against McCarrick and sent them to Pope John Paul II between 1999 and 2001, before McCarrick became D.C.’s archbishop in 2000.

The Vatican report tries to explain John Paul’s decision-making process with documents showing that several prelates concealed information and that some of the pope’s closest advisers believed a letter from McCarrick in which he defended himself from the allegations.

John Paul had a long-standing relationship with McCarrick, the report shows, and the pope’s experience in Poland — where clergy were often personally attacked by the Communist government to undermine their authority — likely had a strong impact on his decisions.

Many who know John Paul’s history have defended him, saying that the report’s account is too stark. “Media claims notwithstanding, that situation was very, very murky,” said Weigel, adding that a lack of clear evidence and McCarrick’s lies made the allegations as O’Connor presented them “less of a bright red flag than it’s being portrayed.

“To condemn John Paul II’s decision-making in 1999-2002 by what we know about McCarrick now is ahistorical and very likely agenda-driven,” Weigel said, “and to turn a 449-page report on a sexual predator, pervert, liar and manipulator into an indictment of another man, as too many have done, is, at the very least, strange.”

Pope John Paul II waves from the popemobile, in the company of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, before entering Sacred Heart Cathedral for a service during a visit to Newark, New Jersey, on Oct. 4, 1995. Photo by Jerry McCrea/ Newark Star-Ledger

The McCarrick report has led to finger-pointing in the already polarized Catholic community, with conservative factions moving to protect their longtime standard-bearer, John Paul, as progressives hail the document as a victory for Francis, who ordered the report that largely exculpates him from responsibility in McCarrick’s continuation as cardinal after the accusations became better-known.

“I think the question of what Pope Francis knew in specific and when did he know it remains to be answered,” Weigel said, adding that Francis should have “insisted on, and enforced, a non-public life for the retired McCarrick.”

“But it must also be said that, confronted by the evidence presented by Cardinal Dolan in 2018, Pope Francis moved swiftly and decisively against McCarrick,” he added.

Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals in July 2018 and ordered him to a “life of prayer and penance” while awaiting a canonical trial.

For Martel, the Vatican report proves that the 2018 letter by former Vatican representative to the United States Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, condemning the Vatican’s handling of McCarrick and asking for Francis’ resignation, “was a lie.”

RELATED: Vatican’s McCarrick report: Three popes looked the other way on sex abuse claims

If Catholic insiders disagree on which pontiff is most to blame for McCarrick’s embarrassment of the church, they agree that the Vatican report leaves many questions unanswered.

One such question is what, exactly, the church should do to restore faith in its ability to handle, and hopefully end, the abuse crisis.

Weigel said that reforming seminaries and promoting fraternal correction among bishops is essential to combating clergy abuse. “The clerical caste system and the ‘men’s club’ mentality among bishops that facilitated McCarrick’s self-promotion and deception remains to be fully dismantled,” he said.

Martel said it’s imperative that those who played a significant role in protecting and insulating McCarrick face canonical trials. “It’s the only way to avoid the legacy of John Paul II being destroyed,” he added.

McCarrick scandal shows why popes, like John Paul, should not be canonized

The fact that John Paul advanced McCarrick in the hierarchy despite warning he received from Vatican officials and Cardinal John O’Connor makes some wonder why he should be considered a saint. Canonizing popes is more about ecclesial politics than sanctity.
Pope John Paul II waves from the popemobile, in the company of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, before entering Sacred Heart Cathedral for a service during a visit to Newark, New Jersey, on Oct. 4, 1995. Photo by Jerry McCrea/Newark Star-Ledger

November 17, 2020
By Thomas Reese

(RNS) — The recent report detailing the Vatican’s response to the scandal surrounding ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick shows why it’s a mistake to canonize popes (or anyone) quickly after their deaths.

According to the Vatican report released last week, Pope John Paul II received warnings about McCarrick from Vatican officials and New York Cardinal John O’Connor in 1999. Two years later, McCarrick was installed as archbishop of Washington, D.C. 

John Paul was beatified in 2011, six years after his death, and was made a saint three years later.

It’s not just popes: The church needs more time to examine any person’s life. The people of Argentina, for example, wanted to canonize Eva Peron immediately after her death in 1952. At the time, thankfully, the mandatory waiting period before the canonization process could begin was 50 years. Though she is still revered by many Argentines, Peron’s reputation has been clouded in recent years by accusations that she and her husband harbored Nazis after World War II.

John Paul reduced the waiting period from 50 to five years, because he wanted to canonize individuals who were still relevant to today’s generation. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, waived even that for John Paul’s canonization in response to popular demand.

As a result, when John Paul was canonized a mere nine years after his death, independent historians did not have access to the secret files of the Vatican, so it was impossible for outsiders to judge his cause. As more information is disclosed, questions are raised about his actions. 

Canonizing popes is a special problem because their canonizations are more about ecclesial politics than sanctity. Those pushing for sainthood are their fans who want their pope’s legacy to be reinforced. It is a vote for continuity against change, as elevating a pope to sainthood makes it more difficult to question and reverse his policies. 

Politically, it is difficult to oppose the canonization of a pope because opposition is portrayed as disloyalty. Those who openly or secretly oppose canonization are usually proponents of change. 

As a compromise, two popes are sometimes made saints at once: Pope John XXIII was made a saint the same day John Paul was in April of 2014. Progressives liked John while conservatives liked John Paul. 

The practice, meant to soothe friction between factions in the church, goes back to Pope Calixtus and Hippolytus (the first anti-pope) in the third century. Legend has it that these opponents, whose supporters fought openly in the streets of Rome, reconciled after being sent to the Sardinian tin mines by the pagan Roman authorities. Both were honored as saints by the church of Rome in an effort to unify the church. 

The joint canonization of John XXIII and John Paul II similarly brought together liberal and conservative factions who had been at odds since Vatican II, which was initiated by John.

I would not be surprised to see Popes Francis and Benedict canonized on the same day within 10 years of their deaths.

The politics of canonizing popes aside, saints are supposed to be models for Catholics and others to imitate. How can anyone who is not pope really model him or herself after a pope — unless you are a cardinal who wants to be a pope?

My preferred candidates for canonization are lay people, especially married couples and young people. I would canonize the Rwandan students at Nyange Catholic Girls’ School who were beaten and killed by Hutu militants in 1997 when they refused to separate into Hutu and Tutsi groups. Their witness against genocide and for solidarity would mean more to young people than any pope.

Were these young women perfect? Not likely, but they don’t need to be: Saints are not perfect; they are also sinners. We need to remember that St. Peter denied he knew Jesus.

But when scandals like McCarrick’s become known, it makes people question the whole system. Which isn’t always a bad thing. When Josemaría Escrivá, the controversial founder of Opus Dei, was canonized in 2002, a Jesuit wag responded, “Well, that just proves everyone goes to heaven.”

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Scandal-plagued Catholic hospital’s story reads like a guide to Vatican turmoil
A tale of mismanagement and corruption that typifies the financial scandals currently swirling around the church.
A cameraman films the Immaculate Dermatological Institute, or IDI, in Rome, Thursday, April 4, 2013. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

November 23, 2020
By Claire Giangravé


VATICAN CITY (RNS) — On Nov. 12, Pope Francis named an interim board president at the Immaculate Dermatological Institute, or IDI, a chronically financially troubled Catholic hospital a few miles from the Vatican gates. The decision may seem an unremarkable one, and indeed it largely escaped notice outside Rome.

But to Vatican insiders, and to IDI’s employees, the new appointment is the latest turn in a story of mismanagement and corruption that typifies the financial scandals currently swirling around the church. Coincidentally or not, it also features some of the major players in other recent outrages, from Australian Cardinal George Pell to ex-U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

On its face, the appointment of the Rev. Giuseppe Pusceddu has a certain symmetry: the priest also heads the Italian province of the Congregation of the Sons of the Immaculate Conception, the order of friars that started IDI in the late 1800s. The hospital is owned by the Luigi Maria Monti Foundation, named for the congregation’s 19th-century founder.

The Vatican statement announcing Pusceddu’s hire commissions him to channel “the charism of Blessed M. Monti, who inspires the Foundation.”

Current and former employees of the hospital, who have lived under the threat of mass layoffs and bankruptcy through several administrations, were having none of it.

“Don’t lie to us about ‘the returning charism of the founding father,’” a former employee, Bartolo di Gregorio, wrote on Facebook, “because you’ll only continue to make him turn in his grave.”

From its beginnings well into the 1980s, IDI was considered one of Italy’s best medical facilities. A nonprofit, it ploughed its proceeds back into cutting-edge technology and handsome salaries for its personnel.

The huge amounts of cash flowing through IDI, however, eventually attracted the attention of speculators and alleged criminal elements. When the hospital suddenly filed for bankruptcy after the financial crash of 2008, the proceedings cast light on transactions that had little to do with skincare: investments in oil exploration in Africa and deposits in overseas tax havens. There were rumors of shoeboxes full of cash and “strange characters” with thuggish accents walking the halls.

The Rev. Franco Decaminada, second right, leaves an Italian financial police barrack after being questioned in Rome, Thursday, April 4, 2013. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

In 2013, the year Francis became pope, Italian authorities arrested the foundation’s then-president, the Rev. Franco Decaminada, along with 40 others, charging Decaminada with embezzling more than $5 million and seizing a Tuscan villa allegedly built with stolen funds. IDI, meanwhile, was swimming in $800 million in debt.

The Vatican, long a benefactor of IDI, along with the Italian government, set about trying to rescue the hospital, not least for the sake of its more than 1,500 strongly unionized employees, many of whom had gone months without being paid.

In 2015, a plan to have the Vatican’s secretariat of state purchase IDI in partnership with the Congregation of the Sons of the Immaculate Conception with the help of $50 million from the Vatican bank was blocked by Cardinal George Pell, who, at the time, was head of the Vatican’s secretariat for the economy.

The partners ended up securing a loan instead from a powerful Vatican department known as APSA, which handles the Vatican’s investment portfolio and real estate holdings.

There was one hitch: APSA had promised Italian regulators it would not make commercial loans. Another: It wasn’t clear that the teetering hospital could pay back a loan of that size. Enter Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who was then Archbishop of Washington, D.C., and his predecessor, now ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who convinced the Papal Foundation, a charitable fund sponsored by wealthy U.S. Catholics, to donate $25 million outright to IDI, while APSA reportedly routed further funding through another Catholic hospital.

RELATED: Vatican’s McCarrick report: Three popes looked the other way on sex abuse claims

In June of 2017, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state who had helped organize the loan and the Papal Foundation donation, appointed Antonio Maria Leozappa, a layman, to run IDI.

The Immaculate Dermatological Institute, or IDI, in Rome. Image courtesy of Google Maps

But IDI’s financial troubles continued. Last Christmas, employees, some of them barely two years from retirement, were informed they would be laid off. Fifty-four other workers have been let go to date.

In addition, the support of the Holy See seems to include the involvement of relatives of Catholic churchmen.

“For five years we’ve been making sacrifices,” a source at IDI who asked to remain anonymous told RNS. “Yet, the individuals sharing the name of several high-ranking prelates in the Vatican kept their job at IDI,” the source added.

One of these is Maria Piera Becciu, who was hired in 2011 as Decaminada’s personal secretary. About that time, according to published reports, Decaminada had approached his new secretary’s uncle, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, then a high Vatican official, about funding a 200 million euro acquisition of another hospital with secretariat of state money. (The cardinal has also been connected to the arrangement of the Papal Foundation grant, but he denies this.)

The prelate has been connected to other questionable deals, most notably the investment of $200 million from another papal charitable fund in a London real estate project in partnership with a European investment fund. An investigation into that investment has already resulted in the banishment of five Vatican employees after their offices were raided in October of 2019.

In the early 2000s, Becciu, then papal nuncio to Angola, was connected to Antonio Mosquito, a businessman and suspected proxy for the influential Dos Santos family, in a proposal to invest church funds in an Angolan oil company. More recently, funds that Becciu controlled as deputy secretary of state have reportedly ended up in a charity run by Becciu’s brother. Investigators are also looking into a transfer of church money to a beer company owned by another Becciu brother.

Cardinal Angelo Becciu speaks during a press conference on Friday, Sept. 25, 2020, in Vatican City. RNS photo by Claire Giangravé

Becciu is not under investigation himself and has denied any wrongdoing, but in late September, the cardinal resigned from his most recent Vatican post after a meeting with Pope Francis, who also stripped him of the rights of his rank, except the title.

If the gutting of IDI fit a pattern of sharp-dealing businessmen using church funds for lucrative private payoffs with the complicity of Vatican officials, the efforts to save the once-distinguished hospital has left rank-and-file Catholics and IDI’s own employees disillusioned about the church’s ability to reform itself.

For IDI employees, hiring Pusceddu seems to restore the Monti Foundation to power after nearly destroying the hospital and allowing Leozappa and his lay board to “do the dirty work” of right-sizing the staff, said the IDI source.

Insiders said recent financial filings by IDI, which is not required to audit its books under Italian nonprofit rules, were filled with unreliable information — “a sandcastle” in the words of one.

While Francis’ dismissal of Becciu and the investigations already underway have raised hopes that he’ll finally put the Vatican’s financial house in order, those most deeply affected by the church’s financial fumbling said that his decision on IDI is a backward step.

“Pope Francis conceded to pressures from the Roman Curia,” one laid-off employee wrote on social media last week. “I would have made (him) a saint for everything he has done to fix the rundown Catholic Church, but for conceding on the IDI question, (he) gave up his holiness.”

The dark side of Italian hazelnut farming

As Italian hazelnut plantations expand to cater to our love of chocolate and nougat, they are leaving a bitter aftertaste on local soil, water and air.


As the early morning mist clears to reveal the turrets of San Quirico Castle in central Italy, the greenery surrounding local farmhouses comes alive with sound: Red-bellied woodpeckers chirp and bright-green tree frogs call to each other among the cypress and beech trees.

But walk a little further towards the fields of young hazelnut plantations and there is suddenly silence: the birds and insects have been driven away by the monoculture. Seemingly never-ending lines of saplings are now the defining feature of Alfina plateau which lies a few hundred meters above sea level. Until recently, much of this area was composed of wildflower fields and a patchwork of different crops.

"Six or seven years ago this place looked completely different," Gabriele Antoniella said. He works as a researcher and activist with Comitato Quattro Strade, a conservation organization in Alfina. Antoniella estimates there are around 300 hectares (741 acres) of new plantations in the area, mostly owned by a few large investors.

The plateau sits in the northern section of Tuscia, a historical region in Viterbo province and the heart of Italy's hazelnut production. Around 43% of the agricultural land in Viterbo is reserved for hazelnut orchards, the bulk of which goes to the confectionary industry for use in products such as nougat and chocolate.


Local environmentalists say once many of the saplings grow, beloved views will also be obscured


Monocultures are believed to be damaging the air, soil and water

The nuts have been grown for thousands of years in the southern part of Tuscia and have largely sustained its economy since production ramped up in the 1960s. But the intensification of monoculture practices and their expansion into new areas such as the Alfina plateau is an increasing concern for environmentalists.

Impact of monoculture on water, soil and air

Several diverse cropshave been replaced by hazelnut plantations, and hedgerows have been cleared to minimize the presence of insects. As the nuts are harvested once they fall, the ground beneath the trees is also usually kept completely free of vegetation.

"For us the hazelnut represents a great resource, but it's cultivated in an unsustainable way," said Famiano Cruciarelli, president of the Biodistretto della Via Amerina e delle Forre, an environmental organization in southern Tuscia. "Hazelnut monoculture has caused problems with water, soil, and air."

The use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides treatments, he says, is making the soil increasingly arid, which in turn has led to its erosion in some places. And during harvest season, clouds of dust are kicked up into the air by the heavy machinery. "That dust is full of chemicals, which are a big problem for people's health," he said.

One of the most glaring examples of environmental degradation can be seen in a nearby volcanic lake encircled by decades-old hazelnut plantations.

"Large quantities of fertilizers have been used in the intensive hazelnut cultivation, and they have ended up in Lake Vico," explains Giuseppe Nascetti, a professor at the Tuscia University who has been studying the lake for over 25 years. This has caused the proliferation of so-called "red-algae," which produce carcinogenic chemicals harmful to environmental and human health.


Famiano Crucianelli says monoculture has made the soil increasingly arid


High-levels of fertilizers have been found in Vico Lake, a body of water surrounded by decades-old hazelnut plantations
Expansion of the industry

While the transformation towards monoculture has been underway for decades, environmentalists say the growing demand for hazelnuts from big companies and investors has further fueled this shift.

Italian manufacturer Ferrero Group, which makes the chocolate and hazelnut spread Nutella, doesn't own or run any farms in the region but is one of the biggest consumers of the nuts produced in Tuscia.

In 2018, the company launched its Progetto Nocciola Italia plan which aims — in cooperation with farming associations — to increase hazelnut plantations across Italy by 20,000 hectares by 2026. In Lazio — a region that includes Alfina plateau — the company is also working with local producers through a farming association in Lazio to develop 500 hectares for the crop over a five-year period. According to Ferrero's figures, 17,708 hectares are currently devoted to hazelnut cultivation in Viterbo, and 80,000 across Italy.

A Ferrero spokesperson said it was a company objective to integrate hazelnut shrubs with existing crops — and that organic production is neither an obligation nor prohibited.

They add the company is also working in collaboration with researchers including those at Tuscia University to "gain a better understanding of its environmental impact" and "enhance sustainability in hazelnut cultivation."

A large amount of the hazelnuts grown in the region end up in chocolate bars and spread

Sustainable, organic agriculture

Yet as local farmer Anselmo Filesi has discovered, choosing a sustainable path isn't without its challenges.

In 2002, concerned about the environmental and health impacts of using pesticides, he converted his small 20-hectare hazelnut plantation in southern Tuscia to organic methods.

But it came at a cost. Filesi says he was no longer able to sell his products to the world's biggest buyers: Most confectionary multinationals require hazelnuts with little damage from shield bugs — a common pest which can cause shriveled kernels and a slightly bitter taste.

"This is very difficult to achieve with organic methods," Filesi said. "If the hazelnuts are not perfect the market will not accept them.

Watch video 05:18 Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/3lOsj
Italy: The struggle between conventional and organic farming

Filesi shells, toasts and packages his own produce before selling it directly to local shops and supermarkets. But he says it's harder for bigger farmers — which usually sell pre-processed nuts in bulk – to make the switch as they fear losing their biggest buyers.

The rush to invest in hazelnut plantations in the area is also increasing land prices, says Filesi, making it harder for small farmers like him to buy or rent land.

"Converting all hazelnut plantations to organic ones could be one way forward, but there is no incentive to do so," said Professor Nascetti, citing a lack of commitment from big companies to pay good prices for organic produce. "Until sustainability is put before profit ... it's unlikely this will happen."

"People do not imagine that behind a jar of hazelnut [spread] there is an environmental and social economic catastrophe," Antoniella said. By staging protests against intensive agriculture, encouraging smallholder farmers to turn to organic farming and not to sell their land, activists hope to foster a new relationship between locals and the land.

"We are not against hazelnuts, but against these agro-industrial methods that don't respect our land," Antoniella said. "We want to show that things can be done differently, that agriculture can be based on respect for the environment."

He glances at the endless lines of saplings and explains that once the trees grow, the striking view of San Quirico castle perched on a hill in the background will be obscured. "The landscape will change forever."

POLITICAL PERSECUTION

Russia opens new criminal probe into Jehovah's Witnesses

Investigators have opened a criminal case into the US-based Jehovah's Witnesses for extremist activities, conducting raids in regions across Russia. Rights groups say hundreds of believers are in prison or facing trial.


Authorities have opened a new criminal case into the Jehovah's Witnesses after the Russian Investigative Committee said the religion's management center had illegally resumed its work.

Investigators said Tuesday that searches were underway in more than 20 different regions across the country.

Russia's Supreme Court banned the Jehovah's Witnesses in 2017 and declared the religious group an extremist organization.

Judges ordered it to disband and authorities launched a crackdown on the religion's adherents.

Hundreds of Jehovah's Witnesses facing criminal cases

According to human rights groups, hundreds of followers are facing criminal cases in Russia, with dozens either imprisonedor awaiting trial.

Among them, Danish citizen Dennis Christensen has remained behind bars following his detention in May 2017. A court in central Russia convicted him almost two years later.

Dennis Christensen, a Danish Jehovah's Witness, was sentenced in a Russian court in February 2019

In July, Human Rights Watch said Russia "has absolutely nothing to gain from the pointless, cruel, and abusive persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses," and urged the authorities to "immediately free Christensen and stop wasting time and resources on these prosecutions."

In September 2019, the US banned two high-ranking regional officers from Russia's Investigative Committee from entering the United States over the alleged torture of seven detainees who identify as followers of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Jehovah's Witnesses identify as Christians. They believe the Bible, of which they have their own translation, was inspired by God and is historically accurate. Observant members of the religion also say Jesus is his firstborn son and inferior to God.

jf/rt (AP, Reuters)