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| Cardinal Wuerl. About to flee the USA rather than face arrest as a leader of a crime syndicate. |
The tidal wave set in motion by the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into Catholic clerical sexual abuses and institutional, systematic cover-ups, continues to spread waves through the Catholic world, and, if reports are to be believed, panic and division in the Vatican.
Church Militant, the online Catholic News site which is normally very protective of the Catholic Church, although no lover of the supposedly reformist Pope Francis, is making a sensational claim, citing Vatican sources, which if true will implicate the Pope himself in the ultimate cover-up - effectively giving protection and immunity from prosecution to a Cardinal named in the Grand Jury report - Cardinal Donald Wuerl.
The claim is that the Pope has ordered that Wuerl be smuggled out of America and brought to the Vatican before he can be arrested by US Federal Authorities. Although these reports can't be independently verified for obvious reasons, other evidence is stacking up that there may be more than a grain of truth in the story. As reported by Church Militant:
Wuerl has apparently gone underground, and sources confirm with Church Militant, that it is the Vatican attempting to orchestrate his escape out of the United States.
Church Militant sources in D.C. confirm that Wuerl has completely gone off the grid — his cell phone has been shut off, he has not been in his private apartment for a number of days, all public appearances have been canceled and he has not even shown up for the weekly private confessions he offers for his priests.
Insiders believe he is holed up in a hotel in the greater D.C. metropolitan area while final plans for sneaking him out of the U.S. are executed.
[...]
The archdiocese of Washington, D.C. is refusing all comment, refusing to field any questions whatsoever about anything.
The reason for this need to whisk Wuerl away to the safety of the Vatican, just as Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston was some years earlier, is not so much to protect him as an act of kindness and compassion but to protect the church and the Pope from the risk of him reveling what he knows to the RICO investigation against the Catholic Church in the United States, rumoured to be about to be opened by the Department of Justice.
The RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations) Act is a US federal law which enables the leaders of a crime syndicate to be tried for the crimes they ordered others to do or assisted them in doing. It was intended to be used against organised crime such as the Mafia but is singularly apt for the Catholic Church which has behaved like a criminal organisation with many of its leaders either committing crimes or assisting others to, and evade justice.
If Wuerl gets an offer of immunity in return for spilling the beans about who did what, who knew and who gave the instructions, it could put "honest" Pope Francis at the centre of an investigation into organized international sex crime. It would be worth the controversy, waved aside with the excuse that a contrite cardinal, who is deeply sorry for his 'misjudgments', is to face a life of solitude and prayer in a Vatican apartment, than to have all the sordid details of the Catholic Church's involvement in an international paedophile ring, and who in the Vatican was behind it, being given in sworn testimony in court by one of its senior operatives in America.
This would be far less easy for the Vatican to ignore than the claims of the former Vatican Ambassador to the United States, Carlo Viganò who has named Pope Francis and called for his resignation.
But there is an even more intriguing story emerging amidst this chaos - that of the power struggle between the conservative die-hards in the Curia and the College of Cardinals and the increasingly isolated reformist Pope Francis. Viganò can scarcely be regarded as a neutral observer in all this, so his sudden discovery of a conscience and his calls for the Pope to resign, can be seen as an almost open revolt, as can the insider leaks to Church Militant as part of a slowly-unfolding coup against Pope Francis and his reforms. There are many in the Catholic Church who believe the good times are not over yet and the law of omerta that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XIV sought to impose, can be restored.
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