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In September 2018, Your News Wire -- a website known for distorting and sensationalizing news stories, as well as publishing conspiracy theories -- claimed that Pope Francis had described efforts to uncover child sexual abuse within the Catholic church as Satan's work. Under the headline Pope Francis: Exposing Pedophile Priests is Satan's Work, the website reported that Satan, the 'Great Accuser,' is influencing Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò in his quest to expose pedophile priests within the Catholic Church, Pope Francis warned. The article then quoted large sections from an earlier report by the right-wing web site Breitbart, which itself wrote: Pope Francis did indeed appear to suggest that Satan (i.e., the Great Accuser) was playing a role in ongoing allegations against senior figures within the Catholic hierarchy, potentially including himself, although the identity of the accuser he had in mind was not clear. Vatican News (an official communications organ of the Holy See) reported on the pontiff's 11 September homily as follows: Francis again referred to the Great Accuser in his homily on 13 September, as Vatican News reported: Francis did not identify any particular accuser or enemy, and there are a couple of reasonable interpretations of what he meant by the Great Accuser. Pope Francis could have been referring to Pennsylvania authorities (including state attorney general Josh Shapiro) behind the publication of a scathing 1,400-page report in mid-August which documented the sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by Catholic clergy over a period of several decades, as well as the covering up of that abuse. If so, the Great Accuser homily would represent a jarring change in tone from the Vatican's initially contrite reaction to the Pennsylvania grand jury report, which saw the head of the Holy See press office write that: However, Francis could (more plausibly) have been responding to attacks made against him personally by Archbishop Viganò, as outlined by Breitbart. On 26 August, as Pope Francis was concluding a high-profile and important visit to Ireland, Viganò (who was Apostolic Nuncio to the United States from 2011 to 2016) published an eleven-page letter containing multiple detailed allegations against members of the Vatican hierarchy, including Francis himself, of whom Viganò is a long-standing critic. As the New York Times reported of that letter: On 28 July, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had accepted the resignation of Cardinal McCarrick, who had served as Archbishop of Washington and was a member of the College of Cardinals, the body that elects the pope. Five weeks earlier, McCarrick had been removed from priestly ministry, in light of allegations of sexual abuse of a minor 45 years ago, which the Archdiocese of New York (the location of the alleged abuse) deemed to be credible and substantiated. At time of this publication, his canonical trial was pending. Conclusion Breitbart's article (which was copied and pasted by Your News Wire) was largely accurate, although it did involve speculation that Francis was specifically alluding to Viganò's allegations when he warned that the Great Accuser was attacking bishops. However, as we have outlined, this is a very reasonable interpretation of the pope's intended meaning. Contrary to Your News Wire's headline, Pope Francis did not actually say exposing pedophile priests is Satan's work. He made a somewhat enigmatic Biblical reference to Satan attacking bishops in order to scandalize the people, at a time when the hierarchy of the Catholic church, including Francis himself, was facing several allegations of covering up historical sexual abuse. While the pope's Great Accuser homily was ambiguous enough to leave itself open to multiple interpretations, it is more likely that it formed part of an ongoing battle between him and Cardinal Viganò (a strong critic of Francis), rather than an effort to demonize any and all efforts to uncover child sexual abuse within the Church.
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