THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALSUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020 N 15of “A Saint of Our Own” and the
head of a center on U.S. Catholi-
cism at the University of Notre
Dame. She said that given the “re-
ally damning evidence,” in the re-
port, had the church waited at
least five years, and not mere
days, to begin the canonization
process “it would probably not be-
gin for John Paul II because of his
complicity in the clergy sex abuse
scandal.”
A reversal of the canonization,
which historians struggle to recall
ever happening, is implausible.
Some historians say the McCar-
rick report is more likely to put
back some brakes on a process
that John Paul II himself sped up.
But the report may complicate the
canonization chances of others at
the top of the church hierarchy
during the late 20th century and
early 21st century, when the
scourge of sex abuse exploded in
the church.
The Vatican report shows that
Pope Benedict XVI told Mr. Mc-
Carrick to keep a low profile when
more allegations of abuse
emerged in 2005. Pope Francis,
despite hearing rumors of the
abuse from his top lieutenants,
trusted that his predecessors had
properly vetted the case and left it
alone, the report found.
Francis has acknowledged his
own failures in believing bishops
over victims. He removed Mr. Mc-
Carrick from the priesthood and
has in recent years instituted new
church policies to increase ac-
countability.
Many church experts consider
those new rules corrections to the
abuses and almost willful igno-
rance of church leaders that oc-
curred under John Paul II.
John Paul II’s defenders say
that the report demonstrated only
that Mr. McCarrick deceived the
pope, as he did many others over
his half-century rise to the highest
ranks of the Catholic Church, and
that it has no bearing on the heroic
Christian virtue that made the
pontiff a saint.
John Paul had been “cynically
deceived” by Mr. McCarrick and
other American bishops, Stani-
slaw Gadecki, the head of the Pol-
ish bishops conference, said in a
statement.
“Saints make errors of judg-
ment, this was clearly an error of
judgment,” said George Weigel, a
biographer of Pope John Paul II
and an official witness during his
beatification process. “McCarrick
was a pathological liar. And patho-
logical liars fool people including
saints.”
Mr. Weigel said that if perfec-
tion were a prerequisite for saint-
hood, St. Peter himself would not
have made the cut. Indeed, infalli-
bility, which is sometimes attrib-
uted to popes, is not a necessary
saintly attribute, and history is
full of saints who were not exactly
saints during their lifetimes.
There have been a satanic
priest, prostitutes, thieves and
much else on the road to redemp-
tion and sainthood. In 1969, Pope
Paul VI removed 93 saints from
the church’s universal liturgical
calendar, but mostly because they
might not have existed, such as St.
Christopher, who carried on his
shoulders an infant who with each
step grew heavier with the weight
of the world.
But much is known about John
Paul II, and some critics are argu-
ing that it is cause enough not to
celebrate him.
Citing John Paul’s “calamitous,
callous decision-making,” which it
said put children around the world
at risk, an editorial Friday in The
National Catholic Reporter urged
American bishops meeting this
week for their annual conference
to “discuss requesting that the
Vatican formally suppress John
Paul’s cult,” or cease celebrating
him. “Abuse victims deserve no
less.”
That is a tremendous irony for a
pope who turned the church into
an efficient canonization factory.
John Paul knocked down the cri-
teria for beatification from two
miracles to one, and did the same
for canonization. In 1983, he re-
duced the amount of time required
between a person’s death and the
start of their canonization process
to five years from 50.
He produced more than 480
saints, and put enough into the
pipeline that Benedict XVI was
able to canonize scores more.
Pope Francis has followed suit,
but has chosen to canonize people
closer to his more pastoral, and
less doctrinaire, vision of the
church, such as Pope Paul VI and
the martyred Archbishop ÓscarRomero of El Salvador.
All three of the popes embraced
the canonization process as a tool
to fortify the faithful with the no-
tion that saints are still among us,
but also as mission statements for
who merits emulation. Given the
ideological divisions in the
church, that approach puts a pre-
mium on speed.
“A process normally begins af-
ter five years of the death of the
Servant of God and not later than
30 years after his death,” the Rev.
Pascual Cebollada, the postulator,
or person who presents a case for
canonization, for the Jesuit order,
explained.
“For the last condition there
are, of course, many exceptions
that must be justified,” he added.
“For the first, there have been less
exceptions.”
John Paul was one of them. Ben-
edict XVI waived the five-year re-
quirement, allowing his canoniza-
tion case to begin only days after
his death. Even before the McCar-
rick report’s release on Tuesday,
there was a growing sense that
might have been a mistake.
In May, reporters asked Msgr.
Slawomir Oder, the promoter of
the cause for John Paul’s saint-hood, whether it would have been
wiser to hold off on the canoniza-
tion. Already by that time, a cloud
had grown over John Paul’s rela-
tionship with Mr. McCarrick and
his close ties to the Rev. Marcial
Maciel Degollado, the Mexican
founder of the wealthy and power-
ful religious order Legionaries of
Christ, who was later found to
have fathered several children
and been a serial abuser.
“All questions were faced, even
the ones you are talking about”
concerning abuse, Monsignor
Oder said. He added that “John
Paul II did not cover up any pe-
dophile.”
But Monsignor Oder, who did
not return a request for comment
after the report’s publication, also
said at the time that the Vatican
did not grant direct access to the
archives to those investigating
the case for John Paul’s canoniza-
tion, and that the Secretariat of
State researched their questions
and provided answers.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vi-
ganò, a former official in the Sec-
retariat of State who became the
Vatican’s ambassador to the
United States, in part prompted
the report by publishing a remark-able letter in 2018 that accused
Pope Francis of having covered up
Mr. McCarrick’s abuse.
To shield John Paul II, who was
actually in power at the time of Mr.
McCarrick’s promotions, Arch-
bishop Viganò argued that the ail-
ing pontiff was too sick with
Parkinson’s in 2000 to be held ac-
countable.
But the Vatican investigation,
which Archbishop Viganò said did
not interview him, says that John
Paul was of sound mind when he
personally made the decision to
reject the accusations and appoint
Mr. McCarrick.
“The record unequivocally
shows that Pope John Paul II
made the decision personally,” the
report says, and it quotes the testi-
mony of the former prefect of the
papal household, James Harvey,
saying John Paul was “fully capa-
ble to make all of his own deci-
sions in 2000.”
The more frequent defense of
John Paul, expressed also in the
report, is that his experience fac-
ing Communism in Poland led him
to believe that false accusations
against priests and bishops were a
political weapon against the faith.
But the reports give a rareglimpse at other, less noble, fac-
tors that led the pope to believe
Mr. McCarrick, namely that the
Vatican operated like an old boys
network where bishops always
got the benefit of the doubt.
John Paul first met Mr. McCar-
rick in 1976. Mr. McCarrick, the re-
port says, “was on a fishing trip in
the Bahamas with teenagers from
some of the Catholic families”
when a telegram told him to come
back immediately to help trans-
late for Pope John Paul II, then
known as Karol Jozef Wojtyla, a
rising star in the church. Mr. Mc-
Carrick joked that Cardinal Woj-
tyła had ruined his vacation, and
they struck up a friendship.
A quarter of a century later, Mr.
McCarrick urged John Paul in a
letter not to believe the accusa-
tions against him.
Pope John Paul II became “con-
vinced of the truth” of McCarrick’s
denial, the report notes, adding
that Stanislaw Dziwisz, now a car-
dinal, recalled that Pope John
Paul II also believed it would be
“useful to nominate McCarrick to
Washington because he has a
good relationship with the White
House.”
Those events, as well as others
in the report, have led some histo-
rians to suggest that the church
redirect its canonization energies
away from the top of the hierar-
chy.
“You are pope,” Professor Cum-
mings said. “That should be good
enough.”Vatican Report Casts Harsh Light on Rush to Make John Paul II a Saint
From Page 1Clockwise from above: John
Paul II’s coffin at St. Peter’s in
2005; worshipers at the can-
onization of John Paul and
Pope John XXIII in 2014; and
John Paul giving a ceremonial
ring to Theodore E. McCarrick
at the 2001 ceremony when he
was made a cardinal.JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESALESSANDRO BIANCHI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES EMILIO MORENATTI/ASSOCIATED PRESS“It’s Like A Hearing Aid You Plug Your TV Into.”TechhiveCan’t Hear
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