From the article:
Bishop Zanchetta was sentenced to four years and six months in prison on Friday after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting two former adult seminarians. If he serves his full prison term, the bishop will have spent longer in jail than he did as Bishop of Oran.
While the court focused on his brief tenure leading the diocese, scrutiny is now likely to fall on the years Zanchetta spent in Rome, under the patronage of Pope Francis, who promoted Zanchetta to bishop in one of his first acts as pope, and who created a job for Zanchetta in the Vatican after the bishop resigned from his diocese under a cloud of suspicion.
Zanchetta was appointed Bishop of Oran by Francis in 2013, one of the new pope’s first episcopal appointments. But within two years local clergy were complaining to the Vatican about the bishops’s behavior towards seminarians.
Yet, despite mounting complaints from local priests, Francis sided with the bishop. According to the former vicar general of the diocese, even after obscene photographs of the bishop and of young men were discovered on Zanchetta’s phone, the pope accepted his explanation that he’d been hacked by “conservatives” and “anti-Francis” forces in the diocese.
Even after the pope finally accepted Zanchetta’s resignation in 2017 — ostensibly for health reasons — the Vatican still insisted that it had not received any firm complaints against the bishop until the following year, despite considerable reporting appearing to show the contrary.
Francis went further than just accepting Zanchetta’s resignation for “health reasons,” though, creating a sinecure position for him in the curia, and giving him a home in the Vatican hotel where the pope himself lives.
Perhaps most awkwardly for the pope, he kept Zanchetta in a Vatican job and residence during exactly the period when the Church was reeling from the scandal of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and as the pope was convening a global summit of the world’s bishops to address the question of episcopal accountability.
That summit produced the landmark legislation Vos estis lux mundi, intended to bring new levels of accountability to bishops around the world, and to ensure Church leaders who failed to take serious allegations of abuse were punished for their negligence.
While Francis did order a preliminary investigation into Zanchetta, and announced that there would be a canonical trial at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2019, the results of neither process have been made public, or shared with the Argentine authorities, despite papal policies explicitly aimed at transparency in such cases. In fact, it’s not even clear what canonical charges Zanchetta is actually facing, or has faced.
Go here to read the rest. Francis biographer and groupie Austen Ivereigh believes it is all much to do over nothing:
For this Pope, and some of his acolytes, whether you are on Team Francis is all that matters. If it had been up to the Pope, Zanchetta would probably now be a Cardinal. Love how the Pope bought, or appeared to buy, Zanchetta’s claim that nasty conservatives had hacked his phone and put dirty pictures on it. No matter how dismal your view of the current Pope, you are being overly optimistic.
If allegations were put against him, you would think an innocent Bishop would have stepped down until a full investigation was undertaken and the Bishop cleared his name. Instead, he was shifted around like a chess piece in order to evade scrutiny.
Cardinal Pell is good example of a prominent cleric who stood down to clear his name. Infact, he basically had to fend for himself, with little support from the Vatican throughout his trial and imprisonment. He relied on his lay supporters throughout his whole ordeal. And still, was offered no apology from the Vatican when he was finally acquitted by the High Court of Australia. It’s any wonder why people do not trust this current Vatican administration.
Card. Mario Luigi Ciappi (papal sacred theologian, 1955-1989, d. 1996, who viewed the 3rd Secret of Fatima at its opening under P. John XXIII in 1960): “In the Third Secret it is foretold, among other things, that the great apostasy will begin at the top.”
The man voluntarily surrounds himself with homosexual predators. Enough said.
You can find a sketch of Ivereigh in the dictionary next to “lickspittle.”
His friend said *it’s much to do about nothing *
I wonder if the friend or the accused
do morning prayers? Liturgy of the Hours.
A portion of today’s;
Psalm 5
A morning prayer for help
It is you whom I invoke, O Lord. In the morning you hear me.
Let my words come to your ears, O Lord:
hear my sighs.
Listen to the voice of my crying,
my King and my God.
As I make my prayer to you,
Lord, listen to my voice in the morning;
in the morning I will stand before you and await you.
You are not a God who loves evil.
The wicked cannot stay near you,
the unjust cannot remain in your presence.
You hate all who do evil –
you destroy all who speak falsehood –
the Lord abominates the bloody and deceitful man.
But in the abundance of your mercy you will admit me to your house:
I will worship you in your holy temple, with fear and reverence.
Lord, guide me in your justice, protect me from my enemies:
let me see the path I must follow.
For there is no truth in their mouth – their heart is a bottomless pit –
their throat is a wide open grave – their tongue seduces.
Punish them, Lord,
and let their own plans destroy them.
On account of their crimes, thrust them from your presence;
for they are rebels against you.
Let all who hope in you rejoice, triumph for ever.
You will shelter them and they will glory in you.
For you bless the just, O Lord,
and your good will surrounds them like a shield.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be,
world without end.
Amen.
Not just predators, but compromised men in general: hands in the till, cozy with corrupt governments, etc. But, yes, given the current state of Catholicism, homosexuals on the make are the essential core of his recruiting effort.
Can a top Jesuit claim ignorance? What else is left?
That sounds eerily similar to McCarrick’s defense when Benedict finally suppressed him with Francis, well elevating him.
You almost want to show Pope 2 choices and pick the opposite of him! So sad.
“The man voluntarily surrounds himself with homosexual predators. Enough said.”
And Francis has jettisoned respected Cardinals such as Sarah, Pell, Canizares-Llovera, Burke, etc.. Competence, orthodoxy and honesty are not the qualities this Pope is looking for in his staff.
Personnel is policy.
This may be a little off topic.But while Patriarch Krill is being rightly called out for being a Putin lackey, Pope Francis’ serving up faithful Chinese Catholics to the evil CCP makes Krill look like a modern day Athanasius by comparison.
True,