Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former papal nuncio to the United States, has come forward with a stunning new accusation against one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church, Cardinal John McCarrick.
00:00:00.000Well, I don't know if you've been able to follow the latest news revolving around the church sex abuse scandal over the last couple of days.
00:00:07.500I know there's been a lot of big news out there, but this development is truly massive.
00:00:16.840It is breathtaking. Words really fail to describe it.
00:00:22.220I'm going to do my best to unpack this and to kind of break it down for you, and then I'll give a few thoughts of my own.
00:00:28.100But my main point here, the main thing I want to do is just kind of give you the basics of this because it's kind of hard to follow along.
00:00:37.360So Pope Francis has been accused of personally, when he was pope, personally covering up sexual abuse.
00:00:47.000This accusation comes from us from an Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who's a former papal nuncio to the United States.
00:00:56.540So that's basically an ambassador for the Vatican.
00:01:00.480So this is a high-ranking person. This is not some random nobody, okay?
00:01:05.680This is a person with intimate knowledge of what's going on, with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the church and the hierarchy.
00:01:13.460This isn't a conspiracy theorist on a blog somewhere.
00:01:16.220This isn't a guy ranting in his car, okay?
00:01:20.160He goes, why would you want to listen to somebody like that?
00:01:22.160This is one of the guys who has been in the upper echelon of the church hierarchy, and now he's spilling his guts, which is absolutely incredible.
00:01:33.180The allegations revolve around Cardinal McCarrick, who was one of the most powerful, was one of the most powerful Catholics in the United States, in the world, really.
00:01:43.080And it's recently been revealed that Cardinal McCarrick is a serial pervert and an abuser.
00:01:48.780He's been accused, many accusations against him.
00:01:52.000He's been accused of molesting two children, but the lion's share—and that's the only reason that we're finding out about everything involving McCarrick, is because of those accusations—but the lion's share of his alleged sins have to do with his behavior with young priests and seminarians.
00:02:08.860He's been accused of groping, assaulting, abusing young priests and seminarians.
00:02:13.000He's been accused of using seminaries as if they're, you know, some kind of gay prostitution house, where he would come in and select his own little harem of homosexual seminaries and seminarians and priests.
00:02:31.620And he would take them back to his beach house or whatever, and they would have gay orgies and all these kind of things.
00:02:36.420I mean, this is just—he was a deviant, pervert abuser.
00:02:41.620And this apparently, like with Weinstein in Hollywood, this was an open secret for many years in the church.
00:02:48.900Although the secret was not open or known among average lay Catholics, this was a secret openly known by many bishops and cardinals, and, if you believe, Vigano, the pope as well.
00:03:03.920Vigano discharged his accusations in a stunning 11-page document.
00:03:10.380I cannot begin to summarize everything that he says, but again, I emphasize this is somebody who has—I think he's 77 years old now.
00:03:47.740He calls out some of the highest-ranking people in the church, accuses them of lying, conspiring, covering up, or of actually being homosexual predators themselves.
00:03:57.580He tells a story about an actual conspiracy of homosexuals and homosexual defenders in the church who have worked in tandem together to keep men like McCarrick in positions of power.
00:04:10.480This is something that little old people like myself and many others have been saying exists in the church, an actual high-ranking, powerful network of homosexual predators.
00:04:22.900We've been saying this for a long time, that that exists.
00:04:25.380And now you have someone who's in the know, who has seen it for himself, and he is saying, yes, yes, that exists.
00:04:34.780And this is not just a crackpot making up accusations.
00:04:37.800This is like, you know, this is the equivalent of—this would be like if Nikki Haley came out and made accusations against the Trump administration.
00:04:52.340About halfway through the document, so he spends the first half calling out one after another, naming names, a lot of names that, you know, most of us have never heard before, although these are powerful people in the church.
00:05:04.720But he's—one after the other, he's calling people out, he's putting their names out there.
00:05:11.280About halfway through, Vigano talks about Francis, and he alleges that Pope Francis knew personally about McCarrick's abuses.
00:05:19.760He says that he, Vigano, personally had a conversation about McCarrick with Francis.
00:05:25.200So that's how he—he knows that Francis knew because he spoke with him about Francis.
00:05:29.560So he knows—this isn't something he got secondhand.