By Francis X. Rocca, February 14, 2019, WSJ
The once-warm relationship between Pope Francis and Cardinal O’Malley has become strained over the Vatican’s stance on sex abuse
VATICAN CITY—Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, chief adviser to Pope Francis on protecting children from sexual abuse, called a meeting with top papal aides in 2017, concerned the Vatican wasn’t living up to its promise of “zero tolerance.”
An appeals panel set up by the pope had reduced the punishments of a number of Catholic priests found guilty of abusing minors. In some cases, the panel canceled their dismissal from the priesthood and gave them short suspensions instead.
“If this gets out, it will cause a scandal,” Cardinal O’Malley told Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, in effect the pope’s prime minister, and other Vatican officials, according to a person present. No action was taken to address the issue.
The Catholic Church’s handling of the long-running crisis over clerical sex abuse has exposed fissures within its hierarchy. Activists and some church leaders hoped the Vatican would take a tougher stance on abuse under Pope Francis—and thought a meeting next week at a global summit of bishops would make progress toward that goal.
Instead, the opposite has happened, deepening the gap between the Vatican and U.S. church leaders, who have pushed for a more stringent response. No clearer is the rift than in the relationship between Pope Francis and Cardinal O’Malley, a bearded Capuchin friar who likes to be called “Cardinal Sean.”
After his 2013 election, the pope made Cardinal O’Malley the Vatican’s point man on sex abuse. The American, who typically wears a simple brown habit and sandals, exemplified the humility that Pope Francis espoused for the church’s hierarchy. The cardinal had earned a reputation for rigor in managing sex-abuse crises in Boston and other U.S. dioceses. The pope shared Cardinal O’Malley’s rhetoric on abuse, promising “tolleranza zero.”
Today, interactions between the pope and the cardinal, previously friendly and spontaneous, have become noticeably formal and terse, says a person who has observed them together.
The Boston cardinal’s influence has declined to the point where, in November, the pope excluded him from the organizing committee of next week’s summit, which had been Cardinal O’Malley’s idea.
A spokesman for the Vatican declined to comment.
Cardinal O’Malley’s spokesman, Terrence Donilon, said the cardinal was “hopeful for a successful conference in February as part of the Holy Father’s commitment to survivors, clergy and the global Catholic community.”
Cardinal O’Malley made his name as a troubleshooter when abuse scandals struck the U.S. church in the 1990s. As bishop of Fall River, Mass., and then of Palm Beach, Fla., he dealt with abuse cases that implicated predecessors, reaching settlements and winning many victims’ trust. He fought back tears when speaking in public of the harm done.
In 2003, he succeeded the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law as archbishop of Boston amid the country’s biggest-ever crisis over the coverup of clerical abuse. Cardinal O’Malley moved into a small rectory, eschewing and later selling the palatial official residence. The money went toward settlements with abuse victims.
The Ohio-born friar is also a fluent Spanish speaker, with a Ph.D. in Spanish religious poetry and a strong interest in Latin America. He was active in organizing the U.S. church’s poverty-relief work around the Western Hemisphere.
This work brought him into contact with the future Pope Francis. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, the runner-up in the 2005 conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI, was known as a tribune of the poor of Latin America.
Cardinal O’Malley “should be nominated for the Nobel Prize for common sense,” Cardinal Bergoglio told a mutual acquaintance in 2010.
That year, the American paid him a visit in Buenos Aires. In a meeting room adorned with portraits of past cardinals, down a hall from Cardinal Bergoglio’s spartan quarters, the two men surveyed church and local politics around Latin America, according to a witness.
When Pope Benedict retired in 2013, Cardinal O’Malley was one of the first Americans to support Cardinal Bergoglio at that year’s conclave, according to Pope Francis’ biographer Austen Ivereigh.
The new pope, in turn, picked the man from Boston to represent North America on his Council of Cardinals, a new body originally consisting of eight members that would advise the pope on Vatican and wider church governance.
Cardinal O’Malley used his role in the new pontificate to push for stronger Vatican leadership on sex abuse. He persuaded the pope to create an advisory panel on child protection, led by himself, tasked with proposing changes to church policies and procedures.
In 2015, the panel recommended a special tribunal to try bishops who ignore or cover up abuse. At a Council of Cardinals meeting, Cardinal O’Malley won the pope’s agreement. The following year, the pope changed his mind.
Peter Saunders, a former abuse victim on the panel, asked Cardinal O’Malley what had happened to the tribunal plan. The visibly frustrated cardinal shrugged, rolled his eyes, and said: “I really don’t know the answer. I wish I did,” according to Mr. Saunders.
The panel proposed that church investigations of abuse allegations should involve outsiders, not only priests, and that Vatican files on abuse cases should be shared with victims and civil authorities. Neither idea became reality. Mr. Saunders and the other victims’ representative, Marie Collins, resigned from the panel in 2017 in protest of what they said was Vatican inaction.
The panel shifted its focus from proposing changes to organizing academic conferences and the pope reshuffled the panel’s membership. In a meeting with abuse victims in Dublin in August 2018, Ms. Collins asked Pope Francis about the personnel changes. The pope replied that “mistakes were made in appointments.” He also said that the commission had not been honest
with him.
“I can’t understand why he would have said that,” Cardinal O’Malley told Ms. Collins, she recalls.
Cardinal O’Malley avoided criticizing the pope, even in private conversations with confidants. He blamed bureaucratic inertia and sounded confident that the Holy Father would do the right
thing.
The dominant view in the Vatican was that the Americans were going too far in tackling sex abuse. When Cardinal O’Malley called for the world-wide adoption of the U.S. practice of publishing accused priests’ names, other Vatican officials privately condemned the practice as
defamation.
The Vatican’s chief prosecutor for abuse cases, the Rev. Robert Geisinger, an American, gave a speech to canon lawyers in Indianapolis in late 2017 that emphasized the rights of accused priests and called for proportioning penalties. If elderly priests committed abuse long ago, tough punishment “opens a human and perhaps even moral question,” he said. He suggested
that U.S. policies reflected political pressure, and noted that some people fabricate allegations.
In balancing toughness with the rights of the accused, the pendulum should swing back to the center, Father Geisinger said. Cardinal O’Malley wrote to the prosecutor’s superior, the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, to protest the speech.
On a trip to Chile in January 2018, the pope defended a local bishop accused of covering up sex abuse. The victims’ persistent allegations, he said, were “calumny” without proof.
Cardinal O’Malley issued a public statement criticizing the pope—an unusual action for any cardinal to take, let alone one so close to the pope. “It is understandable that Pope Francis’s statements yesterday…were a source of great pain for survivors of sexual abuse,” he said. “Words that convey the message ‘if you cannot prove your claims then you will not be believed’ abandon those who have suffered…to discreditable exile.”
The cardinal mitigated the chastisement by adding that Pope Francis was committed to zero tolerance of sex abuse. The pope, talking to reporters, seized on that part of the cardinal’s statement and thanked him for it.
The pope also repeated his view that allegations without evidence are “calumny,” and said the victims had never approached him.
The Associated Press soon reported that Cardinal O’Malley had handed the pope a detailed letter from a Chilean victim telling his story in 2015.
Pope Francis’ troubles grew last summer when a former Vatican diplomat accused him of ignoring earlier reports of sexual misconduct with adults by retired Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Washington. The pope declined to respond to the allegations at news conferences last year.
Archbishop McCarrick is currently awaiting the results of a church trial on multiple counts of sexual abuse and other misconduct. He has said he is innocent of one of the charges. His lawyer declined to comment.
The McCarrick affair, and a prosecutor’s report that documented decades of clerical sex abuse in Pennsylvania, prompted U.S. bishops to draw up new anti-abuse measures. One proposal, for a watchdog body including outsiders to take reports of misconduct by bishops, raised eyebrows at the Vatican.
Cardinal O’Malley, whom the U.S. bishops had consulted on their proposed measures, also advised Pope Francis to call the February summit of bishops to address the sex-abuse crisis. The announcement, on Sept. 12, raised U.S. hopes of a watershed in the Vatican’s approach.
The next day, Cardinal O’Malley visited Pope Francis at the Vatican, along with three leaders of the U.S. bishops’ conference. They wanted to explain their proposed anti-abuse safeguards for the U.S. church, and to ask for a Vatican investigation of the McCarrick case.
Official photos show the men looking cheerful in the pope’s airy private library at the start of the meeting.
The mood became more somber as Pope Francis, speaking in his native Spanish, made it clear he would not authorize a full-fledged investigation of the McCarrick affair. The Vatican later said that it would study its archives in the matter.
The pope also stunned his American guests by suggesting they cancel their annual national assembly, planned for November, where they planned to discuss the anti-abuse proposals. He suggested they hold a spiritual retreat instead. The Americans politely declined to cancel their assembly.
U.S. bishops later set dates in January for a spiritual retreat to satisfy the pope’s request, but also proceeded to flesh out the anti-abuse proposals for the November assembly. The week before, Cardinal O’Malley told the Boston Globe the meeting would lay out clear penalties for bishops who commit, neglect or cover up abuse. “That is something that the bishops will ask for. It will have to be Rome that will make [the decision]. And I think they’ll respond to us,” he said.
Rome responded by ordering the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, to cancel the vote on the anti-abuse measures. The Vatican said it had not had enough time to review the proposals. Cardinal DiNardo made the announcement
in the first minutes of the assembly in Baltimore, amid murmurs of disquiet in the room.
Nine days after the assembly ended, the Vatican announced the organizers of its February summit on sex abuse, including one American cardinal. Cardinal O’Malley, the pope’s point man on abuse for five years, wasn’t mentioned.
That afternoon, Cardinal O’Malley responded by saying he would attend the summit nonetheless, and sought to lay out an agenda. In late January, Pope Francis played down the Vatican’s ambitions for the meeting, describing it to reporters as essentially educational.
“We have to deflate expectations,” the pope told the reporters.