Pope Francis is sorry and not sorry. Last week, he was in Canada to deliver an apology for the abuse suffered by indigenous children in schools run by the Catholic Church. He was rewarded with approving headlines — and an even better photo-opportunity involving a spectacular feather headdress. That may strike you as a cynical attitude to the Pope’s “penitential” journey. Then again, you may not be aware that, right now, Francis is protecting the interests of a sex abuser he made a bishop and then hid in the Vatican.
Under normal circumstances, it would be perfectly appropriate for the Supreme Pontiff to express shame for the persecution of pupils at the Residential Schools operated by the Church in Canada between the 1870s and 1990s. Last year, it was reported that the graves of 200 children had been found near one of these schools in British Columbia. That may be fake news. Some experts believe that the “graves” were soil disturbances and point out that they have not been excavated. No one disputes, however, that children suffered monstrously. Former pupils have talked of savage beatings and being forbidden to speak their native languages. Hundreds of sexual predators were protected.
But this pope has little moral authority to apologise for anyone else’s crimes. To understand why, we need to travel 6,500 miles from the scene of Francis’s meticulously staged expression of remorse in Edmonton to a dusty city in the subtropical north-west of Argentina. Although Orán has only 73,000 inhabitants, it does have a cathedral — a spiky concrete tent that embarrasses even the local tourist board.
Shortly after becoming pope, Francis made his friend Father Gustavo Zanchetta the Bishop of Orán. Zanchetta, then aged only 49, had been a protégé of Francis, then known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires. As an official of the Argentine bishops’ conference, Zanchetta knew that if you were an ally of Cardinal Bergoglio, he could turn a blind eye to just about anything. (For example, in 2009 Fr Julio Grassi, who ran homes for Argentinian street children, was sentenced to 15 years in jail for sexually assaulting minors. In what could be seen as an attempt to have the conviction crushed, Bergoglio authorised a report that trashed Grassi’s accusers.)
The news that Francis was making Zanchetta a bishop horrified the priest’s critics in his home diocese of Quilmes. Two years earlier, Dr Santiago Spadafora, former adviser to the diocese, had complained to Cardinal Bergoglio about Zanchetta’s financial incompetence and “abuse of power” as the diocesan Vicar for Economic Affairs. Spadafora says Bergoglio rang him promising to examine “in detail” the supporting documents he had sent him. Nothing happened. When the new Pope announced that his protégé would be given a mitre, Spadafora started a change.org petition, signed by 100 lay employees from schools administered by Zanchetta, asking Francis to review the appointment. It was ignored.
Gustavo Zanchetta resigned as Bishop of Orán in 2017, less than four years after taking over — and a mere 22 years before he was due to retire — citing unspecified “health reasons”. According to the Italian newspaper La Stampa, he then left the diocese in a “furtive, unexpected flight without even a minimal farewell”.
It turned out that Zanchetta had every reason to act furtively. In 2015, he was reported to have saved pornographic photographs of himself and “young people” on his mobile phone. There were also complaints — fully justified, as it turned out — that he was sexually harassing seminarians. As The Pillar and numerous other Catholic news websites have reported, Pope Francis knew about the complaints and saw the photographs. But he claimed to believe Zanchetta’s explanation that his phone had been hacked.
The Pope met Bishop Zanchetta in Rome and then sent him back to his diocese. Senior priests of the diocese of Orán were so disgusted that they launched a complaint with the papal nuncio in Buenos Aires. Yet, when Zanchetta finally resigned in 2017, the Vatican insisted that it had never received “formal complaints” about the bishop. That was not true.
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