ROME — A former Vatican nuncio to the United States has claimed that Msgr. Walter Rossi, rector of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., has been repeatedly accused of homosexual harassment and predation.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò said that as papal nuncio he received multiple complaints of homosexual harassment against Msgr. Walter Rossi and that the monsignor is “without a doubt a member of the ‘gay mafia.’” The archbishop made these allegations in an interview this week with veteran Italian journalist Marco Tosatti.
“I can say that, while I was nuncio in the United States, I received documentation stating that Msgr. Rossi had sexually molested male students at the Catholic University of America,” Vigano said. “The Vatican, especially Cardinal Parolin, is well aware of Msgr. Rossi’s situation as is Cardinal Wuerl.”
Vigano’s allegations match historic assertions against Msgr. Rossi, to which he has never publicly responded.
According to a 2018 report in the American Spectator, Catholic University alumni have said that Rossi would proposition them. “He insinuated that he would be up for a threesome,” said one CUA graduate, who had a gay roommate with whom Rossi was familiar. “It was gay sexual harassment.”
Despite these accusations, Rossi was proposed as a candidate to be made a bishop, Archbishop Vigano said, in a typical case of unchecked homoclericalism. Rossi was reportedly a protégé of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who personally appointed Rossi as rector of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in 2005.
“Finally, I can testify that Rossi’s name was proposed for promotion to bishop to my predecessor, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, who blocked the process. These facts clearly show how the ‘gay mafia’ operates,” he said.
Rossi’s predecessor as rector of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Vigano pointed out, was none other than Bishop Michael Bransfield, bishop of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia from 2005 to 2018, who has recently come under fire for gross mismanagement of funds as well as “homosexual bullying.”
According to the Washington Post, “a succession of younger male clerical assistants complained to church officials in West Virginia that Bransfield was sexually harassing them.”
“Similar concerns were raised about Bransfield’s conduct in Philadelphia, where he taught at a Catholic high school, and in the District of Columbia, where he was head of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception from 1990 to 2005,” the Post reported.
Archbishop Viganò told the Post last week that homosexuality among the clergy and bishops is at the core of the Church’s current crisis. Vigano said that “the ‘gay mafia’ among bishops is bound together not by shared sexual intimacy but by a shared interest in protecting and advancing one another professionally and sabotaging all efforts at reform.”
“It is not pedophiles but gay priests preying on post-pubertal boys who have bankrupted the U.S. dioceses,” he said, citing groundbreaking research showing that the portion of homosexual men admitted to the priesthood rose from “twice that of the general population in the 1950s to eight times the general population in the 1980s. This trend was strongly correlated with increasing child sex abuse.”
Because of this “overwhelming evidence,” Viganò said he find it “mindboggling” that homosexuality has not been addressed in recent Church documents and meetings, including the February 2019 Vatican summit on sexual abuse.
“Why does the word ‘homosexuality’ never appear in recent official documents of the Holy See?” asked Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò at a February symposium.
“This is by no means to suggest that most of those with a homosexual inclination are abusers, but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of abuse has been inflicted on post-pubescent boys by homosexual clerics,” he said.
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