Pope Francis Accused of Protecting Abusive Clergy and Avoiding Transparency

Pope Francis went to his grave April 21 at age 88 harboring a horrible secret — he failed to fully punish the Roman Catholic Church’s pedophile priests and their enablers.

Anne Barrett Doyle — codirector of the watchdog group Bishop Accountability — acknowledges the pontiff was a “beacon of hope” to many before his fatal stroke. But she adds, “What we most needed from this pope was justice for the church’s own wounded — the children and adults sexually abused by Catholic clergy.”

In 2019, Francis issued the edict Vos estis lux mundi — Latin for “You are the light of the world” — which demanded that all clerics report any suspicions of abuse or cover-ups. But Doyle complains the insular efforts were mired in secrecy and “didn’t involve punishments that were proportional” to the harm done, as multiple offenders were allowed to retain their lofty titles.

“We needed him to follow through on his promises of transparency by releasing abuse data and the names of offending clergy and complicit bishops,” she says. “Pope Francis chose to do none of these things.”

According to critics, Francis also shamelessly gave preferential treatment to some credibly accused clerics.

Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who died April 3 at age 94, was defrocked in 2019 after being convicted of sexual misconduct in a canonical trial. But McCarrick — who served as archbishop in Newark, N.J., and Washington, D.C., and was elevated to cardinal in 2001 — had been accused of engaging in sexual misconduct with male seminarians for decades.

A hidden report from a former Vatican ambassador to the United States even charges that after McCarrick’s mandatory age-related retirement from Washington in 2006, Francis had secretly removed a suspension placed on him by his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI and made him a trusted adviser.

Bishop Accountability claims there were several instances in which Francis showed favor to high-ranking clergy who were suspected of wrongdoing and/or conveyed skepticism toward their accusers — including the cases of Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta, Argentina’s former Bishop of Oran, who was criminally convicted of sexual assaulting two men, and Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, a French prelate who admitted to sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl in the 1980s when he was a parish priest.

Michael G. Dowd, a renowned NYC attorney who has represented hundreds of church abuse survivors in civil suits, believes the pope was handcuffed by church bureaucrats who “too often thought about money rather than doing the right thing.”

And Barb Dorris, the former executive director of Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests, tells The National ENQUIRER that Francis talked a good game but did very little to weed out pedophiles.

“You must remember, the pope is an absolute monarch. He doesn’t need courts,” Dorris explains. “If he says you’re gone, you’re gone. He had the power, and he could have disciplined the bishops — but he didn’t.”