Holy Father can't remember being told of ex-cardinal McCarrick’s sexual abuse of seminarians and adolescents. A shame.

Old fellow losing it? Taking a papal fifth?

New interview, new revelations damage Pope’s credibility by Phil Lawler  May 29, 2019:

In his latest interview Pope Francis says that he does not remember whether or not Archbishop Vigano told him about Theodore McCarrick’s sexual misconduct. He also insists that he knew “nothing, obviously, nothing, nothing” about McCarrick’s misconduct. Those two claims do not sit comfortably side by side.

Says he was in the dark, completely.

But one of his bishops, consecrated at the Vatican and shown here receiving papal congratulations in 2015,

knew all about it.

Bishop Steven Lopes castigated his fellow bishops and cardinals for denying that they knew of disgraced cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s alleged sexual abuse of seminarians and adolescents before it was revealed this year.

“I’ll tell you what response I think is not good enough. It’s the parade of cardinals and bishops who have rushed to the television cameras clutching their pectoral crosses, saying, ‘I knew nothing,’” Lopes said in a recording posted on Twitter by Matthew Schmitz, senior editor of First Things. “I don’t believe it, and I am one of them. I don’t believe it.”

The Twitter link leads nowhere now, which is not surprising in view of the candor it manifests. Lopes was indeed the only gainsayer of his fellows. My bet is that his seniors in the hierarchy, horrified by what he said, got the Tweet shelved.

More:

Lopes, the bishop of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, said that McCarrick frequently visited his former seminary for nefarious purposes that were commonly understood by all who served there.

“Because as one of the youngest bishops in the conference, you do get an interesting perspective, like, for the fact that I was a seminarian when Theodore McCarrick was named archbishop of Newark. And he would visit the seminary often, and we all knew,” he said.

Writer Lawler, continued, as to the remembering part:

If you told me that you studied French in high school, I might not recall that fact five years later; it wouldn’t stand out in my mind. But if you told me that you had wrestled a grizzly bear, whether or not I believed you, I would certainly remember the claim.

And written you off as a nudnik, right?

Is the Pope suggesting that the news Archbishop Vigano says he conveyed—that a cardinal-archbishop had been bedding seminarians, and had been ordered by the previous Pontiff to retire from public life—would not have made a lasting impression?

Seriously?

Yet even that outlandish suggestion is not enough to bring the Pope’s two claims into a workable alignment. Because if Archbishop Vigano had informed him, then even if the Pope somehow forgot, he could not truthfully say that he knew “nothing” about the McCarrick scandal.

Archbishop Vigano, not mincing words, made his own position perfectly clear in responding to the new papal interview: “What the Pope said about not knowing anything is a lie.”

Among kept secrets, it was one of the best ever. One bishop out of how many? The fix was in?