Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò speaks at a dinner honoring then-Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick in 2012 (CNS photo/ Michael Rogel/PMS) I was going through a box of papers sent home from my Commonweal office the other day, tossing out most of them. Then I came across the fourteen-page text of a talk Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò gave at the University of Notre Dame just days before the 2012 November presidential election. Viganò is the disgruntled former Vatican official and ambassador to the United States who accused Pope Francis of covering up Cardinal McCarrick’s history of abuse, decried the existence of homosexual cabals in the church, and called for the pope’s resignation. I don’t think I read his Notre Dame talk at the time, but evidently I put it aside for possible future reference. It’s titled “Religious Freedom, Persecution of the Church, and Martyrdom.” I don’t doubt that Christians are persecuted in many places, but talk of martyrdom in the secular West strikes me as histrionic, if not delusional. Ridicule is not martyrdom. Talk of religious persecution is also a page from the Republican Party’s game plan. In 2012 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was consumed with its fiery opposition […]
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