A Church insider approached me last year and asked if I knew about Monsignor Walter Rossi’s “hit-and-run” incident. In the mid-1980s, not long after his ordination to the priesthood in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and long before his rise to power as…
“Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò is confirming that, as papal nuncio, he received complaints of homosexual predation and harassment by Msgr. Walter Rossi, rector of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.,” reports Christine Niles…
Did I hear correctly? The pope blew it? Called a global summit in Rome to deal with sexual abuse, then spoke mainly in generalities? Skimmed over the need for better means of policing abuse? Left out of his opening speech…
Washington Pope Francis is increasingly showing his hand. He came into the papacy promising to clean up the Church, especially on matters of sexual abuse. In doing so, he raised hopes among the laity, especially in America and Latin America….
There is a church in Rome called the Church of Domine Quo Vadis (Latin for “Lord, where are You going?”). It is situated on the spot where the apocryphal Acts of Peter described a meeting occurred between St. Peter and Jesus….
In the latest revelation about Donald Wuerl — that, contrary to his claims of ignorance, he knew about McCarrick’s misconduct for at least 14 years — he emerges as the amoral but self-protective bureaucrat, undone by his own pass-the-buck-style record-keeping,…
Pope Francis lectured the American bishops this week on their “crisis of credibility” even as his own reputation took another hit in the wake of revelations about one of his protégés. It turns out that another McCarrick-like predator has been…
In September of this year, Kenneth Lasch, a retired monsignor from the New Jersey diocese of Paterson, went public with his story of ignored whistle-blowing against a priest still serving in Paterson. Both the Boston Globe and CNN told Lasch’s story…
The religion, the faith, the belief-species owing its origin to the Babe of Bethlehem has experienced pangs and pains aplenty in the expiring year. Not necessarily in order: the mounting moral toll of revelations about clerical sexual abuse; the continued…
