In the past few days, four stories involving senior Vatican officials have broken:
The defrocking of a former cardinal; a groping accusation against the Vatican’s ambassador to France; an official of the Vatican’s highest court “credibly accused” of abusing a minor; and the appointment of an American cardinal as ‘chamberlain’ in the event of the pope’s resignation or death. No coincidence that all this comes into public view just before next week’s Rome summit on clergy sex abuse.
There is link between the defrocking of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the naming of Cardinal Kevin Farrell as chamberlain of the Vatican.
As acting pope, the chamberlain confirms the death or resignation of the pope, and manages all temporal goods of the Vatican until a new pope is installed. These responsibilities are much more than ceremonial: there is lingering controversy over the death of Pope John Paul I, the 33-day pope in 1978; and during the vacancy between the resignation of Pope Benedict and the election of Pope Francis in 2013, there were hurried reshuffles within the controversial Vatican Bank. So the Vatican’s chamberlain should be like Caesar’s wife.
Farrell entered the priesthood in 1968 through the Legionaries of Christ; years later he shifted to diocesan priest. The Legionaries became a major scandal, with their Mexican founder eventually removed by the Pope for “reprehensible and objectively immoral behavior.”
Maybe old stuff. But during Farrell’s career, he also spent six years very close to McCarrick. Farrell was No. 2 in the archdiocese of Washington when McCarrick took over in 2001, and Farrell remained in that role until 2007. Their close association extended to sharing an apartment. Yet when Farrell learned of the allegations against McCarrick, he told the Catholic News Service, “I was shocked, overwhelmed; I never heard any of this before in the six years I was with him.”
But according to the AP, a priest/professor at a New Jersey seminary “informed the Vatican in a November 2000 letter about … McCarrick’s misconduct with seminarians.” And Farrell was “shocked?”
In the late ’60s the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes featured clever American POWs held in a stalag by numbskull German guards, the thickest being Sgt. Schultz, whose answer to all questions was, “I see nothing, I hear nothing.” Funny on the tube, not so funny in real life.
