Church Militant has learned from reliable sources that Pope Francis has directed Cdl. Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C. be spirited out of the United States before Wuerl can be arrested by U.S. federal authorities.
Earlier suspicions were that Wuerl had already left the country but those reports are not true.
As Church Militant has been reporting, the Department of Justice is seriously looking at opening up a RICO investigation against the Catholic Church in the United States, and Wuerl would be one of the prime targets of any such investigation.
According to sources, Pope Francis is afraid that if Wuerl were to be arrested and charged, he would reveal all he knows, and the DOJ case would lead straight back to the Vatican with the looming prospect of international criminality being exposed.
Officials in Rome fear the U.S. federal government might shortly revoke Wuerl's U.S. passport preventing him from leaving the country, and as a result, they are trying to sneak him out of the nation under Vatican diplomatic secrecy.
Wuerl has apparently gone underground, and sources confirm with Church Militant, that it is the Vatican attempting to orchestrate his escape out of the United States.
Church Militant sources in D.C. confirm that Wuerl has completely gone off the grid — his cell phone has been shut off, he has not been in his private apartment for a number of days, all public appearances have been canceled and he has not even shown up for the weekly private confessions he offers for his priests.
Insiders believe he is holed up in a hotel in the greater D.C. metropolitan area while final plans for sneaking him out of the U.S. are executed.
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Enigmatic_Continuum ago
They're just doing what they've always done.
"Because there has been a public scandal, there has to be a public reparation in some way, and it is normal for somebody to be sent away," he said in a phone interview.
"This is very much in that canonical tradition of making public reparation."
Shell game of the highest order.
Take American Cardinal Bernard Law, whose cover-up of pedophile priests in Boston was at the root of the US church's sex abuse crisis: Law resigned in disgrace as archbishop of Boston in 2002, but he was given a plum job as archpriest of one of the Vatican's prime basilicas in Rome.
Or they're just given a slap on the wrist.
"For a senior church member to be asked to leave the place of his residence for a period of penance and prayer, it's about as a strong a sanction as you can get before the standard canonical penalties about laicization kick in," said Ivereigh.
Laicization, or removing someone from the priesthood, might have been foreseen if he had sexually abused minors, but that doesn't apply in this case, he said. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/vatican-banishes-disgraced-scottish-cardinal-keith-obrien/news-story/ab4ad27049c80d7cc6b5cf28c05f31f9
Guess we'll have to wait and see...