How the same pontificate rehabilitated a serial abuser as a papal envoy—and stripped a doctrinally orthodox bishop of his diocese.
Prepared July 2026 · every claim sourced below
Two men. One shepherd who spent decades preying on seminarians and boys, sheltered by silence and, for a season, restored to usefulness at the highest levels of the Church. One shepherd who taught the Catholic faith without flinching, defended the Eucharist, and paid for his outspokenness with his office. To lay their two stories side by side is not to indulge in conspiracy. It is simply to read the public record—the Vatican’s own report included—and to ask an uncomfortable question about what a Church chooses to punish and what it chooses to forgive.
What follows is deliberately careful with the facts, because the facts are damning enough without embellishment, and because the temptation in a story like this is to reach for the strongest possible claim rather than the truest one. Where a charge is contested, it is marked as contested. Where the Holy See’s own findings cut against the popular narrative, they are reported. The asymmetry survives all of it.
Theodore Edgar McCarrick was, for a generation, one of the most powerful and celebrated prelates in the United States. Born in New York in 1930, he rose through the hierarchy with remarkable speed: auxiliary bishop of New York, first bishop of Metuchen (1981), archbishop of Newark (1986), and finally Archbishop of Washington, D.C. in 2001, where Pope John Paul II created him a cardinal that same year.1 He was a gifted fundraiser, a fixture of Washington’s political and diplomatic circles, and a globe-trotting emissary trusted with delicate missions abroad. He was also, as the Church would eventually admit in the most formal terms available to it, a predator.
The rumors were not new. For decades, whispers circulated about “Uncle Ted” and the seminarians he invited to his New Jersey beach house, where young men training for the priesthood were pressured to share his bed.2 Priests knew. Some bishops knew. Settlements were quietly paid by the dioceses of Metuchen and Trenton in 2005 and 2007 to men who accused him of abuse.2 And yet McCarrick continued to rise, to travel, to advise, and to make bishops—because the machinery of the Church, again and again, chose not to see.
According to the Holy See’s own 2020 report, Pope Benedict XVI, aware of the persistent allegations, privately urged McCarrick around 2009–2010 to adopt a low profile—to leave the seminary where he was living, to minimize travel and public appearances, and to withdraw toward a life of prayer.3 Crucially, these were private requests, not formal canonical sanctions: no trial, no decree, no penalty imposed and recorded in law. McCarrick, characteristically, largely ignored them, and no one compelled him to comply.3 This distinction—informal request versus binding penalty—would become the fault line of the entire controversy.
Under Pope Francis, McCarrick was not merely tolerated; he was put back to work. Though he held no formal curial office, the retired cardinal functioned as an unofficial diplomat and papal go-between, traveling on the Church’s behalf—to the Middle East, to Armenia, and most notably in connection with the Holy See’s delicate overtures to Communist China.4 A man against whom his own predecessor pope had privately counseled restraint was, in the following pontificate, once again a trusted face of the Vatican abroad. Whatever the internal justifications, the public reality was plain: the rumors had never stopped, the settlements had already been paid, and the emissary flew on.
The wall finally broke not through the Church’s own vigilance but through a single credible allegation that could no longer be buried. In June 2018, the Archdiocese of New York announced that an accusation that McCarrick had sexually abused a teenage altar boy in the early 1970s had been found credible and substantiated.5 The dam gave way. More victims—boys and seminarians alike—came forward.
Note the timing. McCarrick faced consequences only after public exposure in 2018—not in 2005 or 2007 when dioceses paid his victims, not in 2009 when Benedict privately asked him to withdraw, and not during the years he was flying the world as a papal emissary. The system did not catch him. Journalism and a single brave accuser did.
No account of this affair is honest without confronting its most explosive claim. On August 25, 2018—while Pope Francis was visiting Ireland—Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States (2011–2016), published an eleven-page “Testimony.”9 In it he alleged that Benedict had imposed real “sanctions” on McCarrick, that Viganò had personally informed Francis of McCarrick’s corruption of seminarians in a 2013 conversation, and that Francis had nonetheless lifted the sanctions and made McCarrick a trusted counselor. Viganò ended by calling on Pope Francis to resign.9
It was one of the gravest public accusations ever leveled against a reigning pope by a senior Vatican diplomat. And it demands to be weighed against the Holy See’s official answer.
On November 10, 2020, the Secretariat of State released the “Report on the Holy See’s Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related to Former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick”—nearly 450 pages drawn from Vatican archives and interviews.10 Its findings complicate both the papal-innocence narrative and Viganò’s account:
The honest reader is left with a picture more disturbing than either side’s slogan. It is not cleanly established that Francis knowingly rehabilitated a man he understood to be a predator; the Report says the paper trail did not reach him. But neither is anyone exonerated. What the Report reveals is an entire hierarchy—popes, nuncios, bishops, curial officials—that had heard the rumors for decades and, at each decision point, chose institutional comfort over the protection of the young. McCarrick rose and was restored not because one villain willed it, but because a whole culture of deference and self-protection made him useful and made his victims invisible.
This is where care matters. The claim “Francis knowingly reappointed a known pedophile” is Viganò’s charge, and the Vatican’s own 450-page report disputes key parts of it. What is beyond dispute is milder in intent but no less scandalous in effect: the Church rehabilitated and deployed McCarrick for years despite what many knew or suspected, and moved decisively against him only when the public forced its hand. That is the defensible indictment—and it is more than enough.
Joseph E. Strickland was consecrated Bishop of Tyler, Texas, in 2012. Over the next decade he became one of the most recognizable orthodox voices in the American episcopate: a tireless defender of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, of the Church’s settled teaching on life and marriage and sexuality, and of the integrity of the Deposit of Faith.13 He was beloved by traditional and conservative Catholics, active on social media and EWTN, and increasingly willing to voice public alarm at the direction of the pontificate—its restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass, the German “Synodal Way,” and what he saw as ambiguity on doctrine.
In May 2023, Strickland crossed the line that career-minded churchmen do not cross. On May 12 he posted, for all the world to read, the sentence that would define the rest of his episcopate—careful to affirm the pope’s office in the very act of resisting his program:13
“I believe Pope Francis is the Pope but it is time for me to say that I reject his program of undermining the Deposit of Faith. Follow Jesus.” — Bishop Joseph Strickland, May 12, 202317
Read it twice, because its two halves are the whole man. First: “I believe Pope Francis is the Pope”—no denial of legitimacy, no schism, no talk of a “usurper.” And then, in the same breath, the refusal to stay silent while what he loved was, in his judgment, being dismantled. It was a stunning thing for a sitting bishop to say aloud about a reigning pope—and he said it from inside obedience, not outside it. That distinction will matter enormously before we are done.
The response was swift. In June 2023, the Vatican dispatched two American bishops—the retired Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson and Bishop Dennis Sullivan of Camden—to conduct an Apostolic Visitation of the Diocese of Tyler: an exhaustive inquiry into its governance and leadership.14 After the Dicastery for Bishops reviewed the findings, the conclusion was that Strickland’s continuation in office was “not feasible.”14
Strickland was removed from the governance of his diocese. He was not excommunicated; canon lawyers and Church commentators stressed that the act was administrative, not penal. He remains a validly consecrated bishop, incardinated and able to function sacramentally as a bishop.16 The distinction matters—and, as we will see, it makes the contrast sharper, not softer.
What Strickland did next is the true measure of the man, and the sharpest rebuke to anyone who would file him under “rebel.” He had refused to resign—but not out of pride or ambition. He explained, plainly and pastorally, that he could not in conscience walk away from the people entrusted to him:
“I couldn’t, of my will, abandon the flock that I’d been given.”
“The Pope does have the authority to remove me from diocesan governance.” — Bishop Strickland, LifeSiteNews interview, November 11, 202319
He had said the same months earlier, when the resignation rumors first swirled: to step down of his own accord, he wrote on September 20, 2023, “would be me abandoning the flock that I was given charge of by Pope Benedict XVI.”18 On the traditional Latin Mass, his reasoning was not ideology but hunger and bread: he had declined to enforce the full weight of Traditionis Custodes because, as he put it, “I can’t starve out part of my flock.”19
And in the very hour of his removal, he did not rage against the Church or impugn the pope’s standing. He urged the faithful to “pray for Pope Francis” and not to leave the Church.19 Here is the hinge of the whole comparison. Strickland spoke as boldly against error as Viganò ever did—and yet he never denied the pope, never rejected a council, never severed communion. He criticized as a son, and when the father struck him, he bowed his head. That is not the posture of a schismatic. It is the posture of a faithful bishop who counted his office as nothing beside the truth he was ordained to guard—a martyr, if the word may be used of a living man, for the sin of candor.
Set the two cases beside each other and the pattern is impossible to unsee.
The defenders of these decisions will insist—correctly, on the narrow legal point—that the two cases are not the same kind of act. McCarrick was tried and laicized for crimes; Strickland was administratively removed for what Rome judged to be a failure of governance and communion. One was a penalty; the other was not. But that legal tidiness is precisely what indicts the culture rather than excuses it. For it means that the machinery of the Church moved with urgency and finality against a bishop whose offense was that he taught too loudly and criticized too openly—and moved with patience, discretion, and second chances toward a man whose offense was the systematic abuse of the young. Speed for the critic; mercy’s long benefit of the doubt for the predator, until the world was watching.
There is a final, bitter turn. If one asks who in this entire drama was actually subjected to the Church’s ultimate canonical penalty, the answer is not the abuser and not the outspoken bishop. It is the whistleblower. On July 5, 2024, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith declared Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò excommunicated for the crime of schism—for his public refusal to recognize the authority of Pope Francis and his rejection of the Second Vatican Council.20
In fairness, Viganò’s excommunication was for genuine schism, not merely for accusing the pope of a cover-up. When the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith summoned him in June 2024, Viganò did not defend himself; he answered with a defiant public statement, dated June 28, 2024 and carried in full by Inside the Vatican and across the Catholic press, in which he openly declared Bergoglio’s election null and rejected the Second Vatican Council in his own words:
“I maintain that the errors and heresies to which Bergoglio adhered before, during, and after his election … render his elevation to the throne null and void.”
“I do not recognize the authority of the tribunal that claims to judge me, nor of its Prefect, nor of the one who appointed him.”
“… the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, which I consider to be completely devoid of magisterial authority … I convictedly reject the heterodox doctrines contained in the documents of Vatican II.” — Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, public statement, June 28, 202421
He had put it more violently still when the charge was first announced days earlier, branding the Council “the ideological, theological, moral, and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian ‘synodal church’ is the necessary metastasis,” and calling Bergoglio one of the “traitors, subversives, and final liquidators of traditional society.”22 To deny the legitimacy of the reigning pope and to reject an ecumenical council is the textbook definition of schism, and a canonical offense of the first order. By his own words, then, Viganò is not a simple martyr; he placed himself outside communion, and the Church’s finding on that narrow point was not invented.
But the optics remain their own kind of homily. The man who abused the young was patiently laicized—and only after public exposure. The man who taught the faith too boldly was removed. And the man who named the corruption, however far he later wandered into open schism, was excommunicated. A Catholic may hold, in good faith and without a shred of conspiracy, that these three facts do not describe a Church whose reflexes of justice and mercy are rightly ordered.
None of this requires believing that Pope Francis is a secret villain, or that a cabal engineered these outcomes in the dark. The documented public record—the Vatican’s own McCarrick Report included—is sufficient, and it is more sobering than any conspiracy, because it implicates not a single man but a whole institutional temperament. The Church that produced these two judgments revealed, in the ranking of its urgencies, what it truly feared. It could live for decades with an abuser in a red hat. It could not live for a single year with a bishop who said, out loud, that the faith was being undermined.
“By their fruits you shall know them” (Mt 7:16). The fruit here is a hierarchy of consequences, and the order of that hierarchy is the scandal. Faithful Catholics are not asked to hate the Church for it. They are asked—as Bishop Strickland himself has insisted—to love her enough to tell the truth about it, to pray for her shepherds, and to hold fast to the Deposit of Faith that no removal, and no rehabilitation, can alter.
It would be easy to read all of this as a brief for rebellion. It is not. The ground on which it stands—the ground on which Bishop Strickland stood—is older and steadier than the present disorder, and it is worth marking plainly, lest the argument be mistaken for the very schism it laments.
The Second Vatican Council was a true council; one may hold its fruits in the West to have been ruinous without pretending it was no council at all. It defined no dogma and bound nothing under anathema—it called itself pastoral—and even Archbishop Lefebvre signed the greater part of its documents, reserving his objections to a few specific texts on religious liberty and ecumenism. To weigh the post-conciliar collapse by its fruits—the very test named above—is not to reject the Church’s authority; it is to take the crisis seriously where the “spirit of the Council” would rather not look. This is, in substance, what Benedict XVI meant when he set a hermeneutic of rupture against a hermeneutic of reform in continuity: the documents are to be read in the light of Tradition, and where they were read instead as a break with it, the wreckage followed.23
So too with the papacy. There is a pope; the See is not empty. To declare it vacant—to have a private man judge and depose the Roman Pontiff—is not traditionalism but its mirror-image error: the same ultramontane overreach, merely turned upside down. The Church has endured worldly, weak, and erring popes before. Honorius was condemned by an ecumenical council; John XXII was publicly corrected for preaching error on the Beatific Vision; and the barque sailed on. The guarantee was never that the man in white would be admirable—only that he could not bind the whole Church to heresy. A Catholic may therefore say, without a whisper of schism, that the seat is filled and the house is in disorder, and give himself to prayer, to fidelity, and to the plain teaching of the faith—exactly as Strickland counseled when he told his people to pray for the pope and not to leave the Church. And it bears repeating: the pontificate chronicled here has already passed into history; the See has since changed hands.
That is the narrow and unfashionable middle: recognize, and resist. Obey where one must, speak where one can, and reject nothing the Church has truly bound. It is the ground the abuser never had to worry about, and the ground the schismatic threw away. It is the ground the faithful bishop kept—and lost his diocese to hold.