Just when the Unholy Left thinks it’s safe to embrace a Catholic pontiff, he goes and says something like this:
Many watched in disbelief: There he was, Pope Francis, calling people in Osorno, a city in southern Chile, “dumb” for protesting against a bishop accused of being complicit in clerical sexual abuse.
“The Osorno community is suffering because it’s dumb,” Pope Francis told a group of tourists on St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, because it “has let its head be filled with what politicians say, judging a bishop without any proof. Don’t be led by the nose by the leftists who orchestrated all of this,” the pope said.
The video, filmed by an Argentine tourist in May, was obtained by a Chilean television station and broadcast Friday, quickly instilling doubts here about the pope’s commitment to protecting victims of sexual abuse.
Under a heavy rain, demonstrators with black balloons chanted again outside the San Mateo Cathedral in Osorno on Sunday as the bishop at the center of the controversy, Juan Barros, said Mass. Bishop Barros was appointed by the pope to head the Diocese of Osorno this year, despite reports that he had covered up sexual abuses committed by the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a prominent priest in Santiago, the capital.
“The pope’s comments aggravated our discontent,” said Juan Carlos Claret, a spokesman for Osorno’s Lay Organization, which has been holding protests and candlelight vigils against Bishop Barros for months.“It is the Church of Osorno that is demonstrating; we are not taking orders from political parties,” Mr. Claret said. “We are now seeing the real face of Pope Francis, and we demand an explanation.”
The Vatican’s passive complicity in its male homosexual priests’ abuse of boys for so long is to its eternal disgrace. But read the whole story, which very much gets down into the weeds, before jumping to conclusions about Bishop Barros. “Orchestrated” seems the operative word here.
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