NEW YORK (NY)
ABC News
October 28, 2018
By David Wright
Even for an institution that measures its milestones by the millennium, the Roman Catholic Church is now wrestling with an urgent, some would say epochal, moment of truth.
It’s an existential crisis brought on by two threats from within: the worldwide sexual abuse scandal and deep internal divisions over the core message of the faith. The last time the Vatican faced a crisis this big, according to some respected church scholars, was 500 years ago during the Protestant Reformation.
The battle lines in the church mirror the divisions of Trump’s America. The partisan infighting, just as bitter. And what makes it more than just the standard squabbling among the curia is the larger sexual abuse scandal looming in the background. This is what reformation looks like in the #MeToo era.
The Martin Luther of the new rebellion is the archbishop who dared to call on the pope to resign for turning a blind eye to the sexual misconduct of an American cardinal. Archbishop Carlo Vigano, former papal nuncio to the U.S., has faced serious pushback from the pope’s defenders for calling out Francis over his handling of disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Vigano is in hiding, saying he fears for his life. But he’s not backing down.
Vigano’s new letter denounces what he calls the “scourge of homosexuality” in the clergy which he now flat-out claims is to blame for the broader sexual abuse scandal rocking the church Vigano urges his fellow bishops to back him up.
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