The Vatican summit on sex abuse is underway. It will accomplish nothing. Pope Francis has made sure of that. He has stacked its participants with close allies. Several of them were protégés of Theodore McCarrick. Remember him? He clawed his way to power as the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, he’d groomed and raped a boy he’d baptized as a baby. He tried to molest a whole generation of seminarians, treating the school for the Christian priesthood like some Hollywood casting couch.

I’ve had seminarian friends. They’re young men who’ve left behind everything, to follow the call of Christ. They aren’t earning usable academic degrees. And they don’t make any money. They make themselves totally dependent on the Church. Seminarians are to bishops as Army privates are to a four-star general.

Sexual advances by higher-ups aimed at seminarians and younger priests helped weave the homosexual network that now plagues our clergy and bishops. Those who played along could expect to be promoted. For instance, those who let McCarrick give them body rubs got known as his favored “nephews.” They called him “Uncle Ted.”

A Special Place in Hell

Here’s Uncle Ted being a full frontal Sadducee. Tim Russert asks him if there’s a “special place in Hell” for sex abusers. (This is before he was exposed as being one.)

Ted McCarrick saw such young men as juicy sexual targets. Rectors of seminaries used to “hide the handsome ones” when McCarrick appeared. And Pope Francis knew all about it. So said whistleblower Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano. And so says author Frédéric Martel in his new book about gays in the Vatican. It was compiled with the collusion of Pope Francis’s closest allies. When an orthodox Vatican diplomat and a Church-bashing gay activist both report a fact, chances are they aren’t colluding in a lie. Martel writes that Francis

was initially informed by Viganò that Cardinal McCarrick had had homosexual relations with over-age seminarians, which was not enough in his eyes to condemn him.

McCarrick had backed Francis’s election. (Watch him say so here, and speak of how Francis would “change the Church” in five years.) He favored Francis’ social justice gospel, and de-emphasis on chastity. So Francis lifted the penalties which Pope Benedict had imposed on him, and sent him globe-trotting as a Vatican diplomat.

Ted McCarrick, Papal Bag Man

Francis also relied on McCarrick to loot the Papal Foundation of $25 million. Why? To bail out a bankrupt, apparently Mafia-linked Catholic hospital in Rome. It might prove awkward if reporters got to question McCarrick about that. That explains, I think, why McCarrick’s rape and predation only earned him removal from the priesthood. He wasn’t excommunicated, and he still lives in comfort — guarded from reporters — at Church expense. When he dies, his secrets die with him.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Francis’ main protégé and a leader of the summit, Cardinal Blaise Cupich of Chicago, has minimized the evil of what McCarrick did to seminarians. In January U.S. bishops tried to make their own number accountable for sex abuse. With Vatican backing, Cupich jumped up to dismiss the abuse of seminarians as totally different from child abuse, because it “might be consensual.” (You know, like Louis CK’s solo “performance” in front of Sarah Silverman.)

Cupich once dismissed discussion of McCarrick’s predatory behavior as a “rabbit hole” he didn’t want to go down, since it might detract from the pope’s emphasis on … climate change. Let’s remember that Cupich equated Planned Parenthood’s sale of baby parts with President Trump’s deportation of illegal aliens.

Since then we learned that as Bishop of Spokane, Cupich did nothing to protect the students of a Catholic college from a cabal of priests removed for sex abuse. He let the Jesuits house these men on campus, where they mixed with students, without warning anyone. We can thank Cupich for insisting that the abuse of 20-year-old would-be priests by the heirs of the Apostles not get addressed by the Vatican. Why hold the Catholic bishops to the same standard that Hollywood producers now get held, in the wake of Harvey Weinstein?

Cupich’s latest foray into Church governance? Denying that homosexuality among priests was a cause of the sex abuse scandal, even though 80% of the victims were male and over 14. He dismissed Pope Benedict XVI’s ruling that seminaries should try to screen out homosexual men. Meanwhile, an anti-sex abuse group has called on the Vatican to defrock five more bishops implicated in sex abuse.

Another Simpleton and McCarrick Crony

Last week, Pope Francis appointed as Camerlengo Cardinal Kevin Farrell, formerly of Dallas. The Camerlengo manages (and sometimes tilts the outcome of) papal elections. So when Francis goes to meet his reward in the afterlife, Farrell will supervise the next conclave. Farrell, church trivia fans will remember, was the personal driver for sex abuser Fr. Marcial Maciel, and the roommate of sex abuser Theodore McCarrick. In both cases, he claimed, he noticed nothing wrong.

Notable for his absence from the summit is Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston. O’Malley is actually the papal point man on sex abuse, so you’d think he’d play a part. But he must have angered Francis when he contradicted the pope’s own words last year. That was when the Pope indignantly insisted that he’d never been informed of the sex abuse coverup accusations against South American Bishop Juan Barros. But O’Malley spoke up and insisted that he’d provided the pope a letter from one of the victims of Barros’s coverup. Subsequently, the pope met with the victim, and assured him that God (not the priest who molested him at a formative age) had “made him gay.”

A Big Lavender Trial Balloon

The lavender tsunami that has overwhelmed the priesthood and ranks of bishops shows no signs of subsiding. In fact, I expect some move by Francis to grant more recognition to LGBT activist claims. Why do I think so? Because this is a papacy defined by its trial balloons. A papal ally says something, the Vatican gauges reaction, and then marches as far toward heresy as it seems it can get away with. So don’t think me paranoid when I judge the statement below, by papal biographer and close ally Austen Ivereigh, one more Francis-approved Hindenburg which the faithful must shoot down.

.@austeni Austen Ivereigh tweets about Our Lord Jesus Christ having "homosexual tendencies".

Ivereigh is one of the founders of @CatholicVoices
& an expert on Jorge Bergoglio

He has since deleted this tweet. Did it reveal too much about the Bergoglian heresy? pic.twitter.com/RxsHk8MlJg

— Nick Donnelly (@ProtecttheFaith) February 18, 2019