A TOP Vatican cardinal has issued a scathing rebuke of the ambassador who accused Pope Francis of covering up the sexual misconduct of a prominent American cardinal.
Cardinal Marc Ouellet said Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano's claims were false and "blasphemous", and demanded that he repent.
Six weeks after Archbishop Vigano threw the papacy into turmoil over his claims about ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the head of the Vatican's bishops' office said there was no evidence in his files backing the archbishop's claims that Francis annulled any sanctions against McCarrick.
Cardinal Ouellet's letter was issued a day after Francis authorised a "thorough study" of all Vatican archives into how McCarrick rose through the ranks of the Catholic Church despite allegations he sexually preyed on seminarians and young priests.
The letter, addressed to Archbishop Vigano but identified as an open letter to the faithful, marked an extraordinary and decisive end to the official Vatican silence about the claims.
In it, Cardinal Ouellet both defended the pope and criticised Archbishop Vigano, asserting that the conservative cleric had used the scandal over sexual abuse in the US to score ideological points with Francis' critics on the Catholic right.
The cardinal said a review of his files showed there were no documents about any sanctions imposed on McCarrick and that it was "false" to suggest Francis had annulled any such measures.
Cardinal Ouellet did acknowledge that McCarrick had been "strongly exhorted" not to travel or appear in public, and to live a discreet life of prayer given rumours against him about his past behaviour with young adult men.
The McCarrick scandal has thrown the US and Vatican hierarchy into turmoil, given it was apparently an open secret in some US church circles that he would invite seminarians to his New Jersey beach house and into his bed.
Two men received settlements starting in 2005 from two New Jersey dioceses after they alleged McCarrick sexually molested or harassed them.
The Vatican was informed about the seminarian complaints as far back as 2000.
Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as a cardinal in July after a US church investigation determined that an allegation that he groped a teenage altar boy in the 1970s was credible.
Since then, another man has come forward saying McCarrick molested him when he was a young teenager and other men have said they were harassed by McCarrick as adult seminarians and young priests.
Cardinal Ouellet's letter marked the Vatican's first direct response to Archbishop Vigano's 11-page denunciation on August 26 in which he accused two dozen Vatican and US church officials of covering up for McCarrick, and demanded Francis's resignation over his role in the scandal.
In the document, the archbishop claimed he told Francis during a meeting on June 23 2013 that Pope Benedict XVI had sanctioned McCarrick to a lifetime of penance and prayer for having "corrupted a generation of seminarians and priests".
Archbishop Vigano implied that Francis still rehabilitated McCarrick from the "canonical sanctions" and made him a trusted counsellor.
Cardinal Ouellet noted that the June 23 meeting occurred as Francis was meeting with all his ambassadors for the first time, and was gathering an "enormous quantity of verbal and written information" about the church around the world.
He wrote: "I strongly doubt that McCarrick concerned him (Francis) to the degree you'd like to think, given he was an 82-year-old emeritus archbishop who had been out of a job for seven years."
Cardinal Ouellet said in all his meetings with Francis about bishop nominations, he never heard him refer once to McCarrick as a trusted counsellor.
He said he could not believe Archbishop Vigano had arrived at such a "monstrous" and "blasphemous" conclusion given that Francis had nothing to do with McCarrick's career rise in the previous decades.
He said he understood that Archbishop Vigano might be bitter at the way his own career ended and his disagreement with Francis' policies. But he wrote: "You cannot end your priestly life in an open and scandalous rebellion that inflicts a painful wound" on the church and divides its people.
And he urged Vigano: "Come out of your hiding place, repent for your revolt and return to better sentiments toward the Holy Father."
