An Italian priest who called out Pope Francis as “mediocre” and a “heretic in need of conver-sion” in his All Saints Day sermon has been suspended by his bishop. Father Fabio Ragusa, assistant priest in the parish Borgio Verezzi, Savona, denounced the pontiff for “uttering truly senseless statements” endorsing homosexual civil unions and stressed that “it was imperative to obey the Catechism and the Church’s doctrine.”

Pope Francis pledged November 11 to rid the Catholic Church of sexual abuse and offered prayers to victims of former Cardinal Theodore Mc-Carrick, a day after the Vatican released a detailed report into the decades-long church cover-up of his sexual misconduct.
The Vatican report blamed a host of bishops, cardinals and popes for downplaying and dis-missing mountains of evidence of McCarrick’s misconduct starting in the 1990s — but largely spared Francis. Instead, it laid the lion’s share of the blame on St John Paul II, a former Pope, for having appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington in 2000, and making him a cardinal, despite having commissioned an inquiry that found he had slept with seminarians.
Francis concluded his weekly general audience by recalling that the report into the “painful case” of the former high-ranking American cardinal had been released the previous day.
“I renew my closeness to victims of any abuse and commit-ment of the church to eradicate this evil,” Francis said. He then paused silently for nearly a minute, apparently in prayer.

While the world is still digesting the McCarrick report, released by the Vatican on November 10, the blame game has begun in Poland, St John Paul II’s homeland. One of the report’s few living protagonists is Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul’s longtime personal secretary, who was mentioned 45 times in the document.
But the storm for Dziwisz actually started the day before the report was released, when TVN24 aired “Don Stanislaw” by journalist Marcin Gutowski, a 90-minutes-long documentary “showing another face of Cardinal Dziwisz,” as the station advertised it.
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The film aired a long list of accusations from covering up for his friends from the seminary, to the role of Dziwisz in the case of the late Father Marcial Maciel, the disgraced founder of the Legionaries of Christ, another other dark spot in John Paul’s pontificate.
The McCarrick report and the documentary “Don Stanislaw” both contained accusations Dziwisz hid correspondence from  John Paul.
But the Vatican report also confirmed letters sent to Dziwisz regarding the McCarrick case, and even the one written by the American prelate in August 2000 defending himself, was indeed given to the pope. The release of the McCarrick report has been hotly debated in Poland, especially how it might influence the legacy of John Paul.