Former top Vatican emissary claims pope knew of abuse by Catholic clergy

VATICAN: Calls for Pope Francis to resign ignited after the Vatican’s retired ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, charged in an 11-page testimony that the pontiff—and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI—knew about decades’ worth of accusations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington, D.C. The accusations involve sex abuse of minors. Some immediate perspectives worth considering come from Catholic columnist Ross Douthat, who has some reservations about the claims, and commentator Rod Dreher, who unpacks why the claims are credible.

NIGER: Once billed at $50 million, the price tag for a new U.S. Air Force base in western Africa to station armed MQ-9 Reaper drones—one of the most remote U.S. military bases anywhere—may top $280 million.

TURKEY: Mesale Tolu, a German-Turkish journalist jailed last year, returned to Germany on Sunday and vowed to continue fighting for colleagues, including her husband, imprisoned in Turkey’s crackdown after a failed coup in 2016.

EGYPT: In Minya, newly completed paintings of the martyrs beheaded by ISIS now hang in their home church.

SYRIA: It’s rare to say this about anything happening in war-plagued Syria, but I could watch over and over again these boys jumping off a recently installed bridge in Raqqa, the former headquarters of ISIS, where beheadings of Christians began.

MAN KNOWS NOT HIS TIME: In the spring of 2008, presidential candidate John McCain went on a confessional tour, telling audiences that experience was not so much a great benefactor as an exacting teacher: “I am, from hard experience and the judgment it informs, a realistic idealist.” It was a counter-intuitive moment for a decorated war hero running for the White House at age 71, and represented a turning point. The “party boy” and ambitious lawmaker, who took up residence in Arizona to win a congressional seat, became in his last years a moderating statesman who left his Episcopal roots to attend a Baptist church in Phoenix and spoke honestly of his failings. He died on Saturday due to complications from brain cancer at age 81.

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