VATICAN - Satan, the “Great Accuser,” has been unleashed against the bishops of the Church, Pope Francis said Tuesday, in a thinly veiled reference to the former Vatican nuncio to the United States. The former nuncio, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, recently accused a number of prelates of dereliction of duty in dealing with clerical sex abuse and claimed that the pope had rehabilitated serial abuser Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, elevating him to a position of influence despite knowledge of his misdeeds.
In an 11-page testimony published on August 25, Viganò alleged that he had personally informed Pope Francis in 2013 of the serial homosexual abuse perpetrated by Cardinal McCarrick, along with sanctions imposed on his ministry by Pope Benedict XVI, and yet the pope lifted those sanctions and involved McCarrick in the naming of future bishops.
“The Great Accuser, as he himself tells God in the first chapter of the Book of Job, roams around the earth looking for someone to accuse,” Francis said in his morning homily at Mass in the chapel of the Santa Marta residence in the Vatican. In these times “it seems that the Great Accuser has been unleashed and has it in for the bishops,” the pope said.
“It is true, we are all sinners, we bishops,” he said, but the Great Accuser “seeks to unveil sins so that they may be seen, to scandalize the people.” Despite the pope’s frequent calls for transparency and accountability for those responsible for committing or covering up sex abuse, he seemed to suggest Tuesday that the former nuncio had behaved like Satan by making public the errors of his brother bishops.
“Just what is an APOSTLE?”
Today we find the Church of God in a “wilderness of religious confusion!”
The confusion is not merely around the Church – within the religions of the world outside – but WITHIN the very heart of The True Church itself!
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