SOHRAB AMARI: The Catholic abuse scandal now leads all the to way the Vatican.

The Viganò testimony bears the mark of a man seething with anger and perhaps facing the mystery of death. “It is in moments of great trial that the Lord’s grace is revealed in abundance and makes His limitless mercy available to all,” the 77-year-old churchman writes near the end. “But it is granted only to those who are truly repentant.”

For American and global Catholicism, Viganò’s dark night of the soul presents a bright clarifying moment. The document portrays a church whose highest echelons are dominated by old men who apparently don’t believe, or at least don’t take all that seriously, what she has taught about human sexuality for two millennia. And others who are willing to cut corners to protect their decadent brethren.

Either Viganò’s core claims hold water, or they don’t. Either the Vatican was informed of McCarrick’s predations as early as 2000 only to turn a blind eye, or it wasn’t.

Either Pope Benedict XVI imposed private sanctions against McCarrick in 2009-10, barring him from celebrating public Masses and cavorting with seminarians, or he didn’t. Either McCarrick’s successor as cardinal-archbishop of Washington, Donald Wuerl, was aware of the sanctions, or he wasn’t.

Either Pope Francis rehabilitated McCarrick upon taking the Petrine office, despite being warned of the abuse “dossier,” or he didn’t.

If Viganò is telling the truth about these things, then the moral catastrophe he describes is horrifyingly real.

Everything else is noise.

The response I’ve seen seems more about his motives than his accuracy.