Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston (United States), member of the Council of Cardinals or C9 that advises Pope Francis and president of the Pontifical Commission for the Guardianship of Minors, He turned 80 on Saturday, June 29. with which he will no longer participate in the next conclave to elect the Pope.
In this way, the cardinal electors who could still participate in a future conclave now drop to 125, out of a total of 236 members of the College of Cardinals.
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One of the cardinal’s latest actions has been to send a letter to the dicasteries of the Vatican Curia, requesting “pastoral prudence to avoid showing works of art in a way that could leave implicit exoneration or subtle defense.” ” of priests accused of abuse like Father Marko Rupnik, “or expressing indifference to the pain and suffering of many victims.”
What Cardinal O’Malley said, urging that the Vatican not use works by Rupnik in its communications, came a week after the prefect of the Dicastery of Communications, Paolo Ruffini, said in the United States that he does not agree with remove the works of the priest expelled from the Jesuits in 2023.
It is not the first time that the cardinal has “amended” a Vatican authority. In 2018 he had already done so with Pope Francis himself, when he regretted some statements by the Holy Father regarding the case of the then Bishop of Osorno, Mons. Juan Barros, accused of covering up abuses.
“Understandably, Pope Francis’ statements yesterday (January 18) in Santiago, Chile, have been a source of great pain to survivors of sexual abuse committed by clergy or other perpetrators.”
On January 18, before the Mass he presided in Iquique, the Holy Father told journalists: “The day they bring me evidence against the then Bishop Barros, I will speak there. There is not a single piece of evidence against it. Everything It is slander, is that clear?”
“The words that carry the message ‘if you cannot prove your accusations then you will not be believed’, abandon those who suffer reprehensible criminal violations of their human dignity and relegate the survivors to a discredited exile,” the cardinal indicated then. , who since 2014 was already president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
Who is Cardinal O’Malley?
Seán Patrick O’Malley was born on June 29, 1944 in Lakewood, Ohio (United States). He is 80 years old.
He made his solemn profession as a Capuchin Franciscan on July 14, 1965. He was ordained a priest on August 29, 1970.
He obtained a master’s degree in religious education and a doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese literature at the Catholic University of America in Washington, where he taught from 1969 to 1973.
In 1973 he began serving as Executive Director of the Catholic Hispanic Center in the Archdiocese of Washington before being named Episcopal Vicar for the Hispanic, Portuguese and Haitian Communities and executive director of the Archdiocesan Office of Social Ministry in 1978.
He was appointed Coadjutor Bishop of the Diocese of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands on May 30, 1984 and received episcopal consecration on August 2 of the same year.
On June 16, 1992, he was appointed Bishop of Fall River, where he served 10 years, during which he was apostolic visitor to several seminaries in Central America and the Caribbean.
On September 3, 2002, he was named bishop of the Diocese of Palm Beach. After less than a year there, on July 1, 2003, he was appointed Archbishop of Boston, succeeding Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, who had resigned in December 2002 following the sexual abuse scandal in that archdiocese.
Pope Benedict XVI created him a cardinal on March 24, 2006. In 2010 he appointed him Apostolic Visitor to the Archdiocese of Dublin (Ireland) in response to cases of sexual abuse.
Pope Francis elected him in 2013 as a member of the Council of Cardinals (C9) that advises him and in 2014 appointed him president of the Pontifical Commission for the Guardianship of Minors in the Vatican.
Walter Sanchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.