You might think that the enthusiastic support Pope Francis has offered for environmentalism, open borders, and the normalization of homosexual behavior would buy him support from liberal media. But Der Spiegel, the most important weekly magazine in Europe, has turned against the Roman Catholic Prelate with a cover story that proclaims (auf Deutsch) the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not lie,” with a subhead: “The Pope and the Catholic Church in their greatest crisis.”

Der Spiegel’s online English-language website has not yet published a translation of its new cover story, but via the website Rorate Caeli, we get a partial translation from the Catholic Herald:

The report most notably includes an interview with an abuse survivor from Argentina who says she was one of a group of victims who wrote to Francis shortly after his election, but never received a reply.

The woman, Julieta Añazco, says she was sexually abused by a priest when she was seven years old. She said that in 2013, shortly after Pope Francis was elected, she and 13 other victims wrote to him to describing what had happened.

They sent the letter by recorded delivery and, three weeks later, received a confirmation of receipt. However, they never received a reply.

The accused priest was subsequently transferred to a nursing home where he “continues to celebrate Mass”.

“During Bergoglio’s time as cardinal, many of the abuse victims in Buenos Aires had turned to him for help; nobody was permitted access to him,” the magazine says, adding that there are currently 62 trials in process against Argentine priests. “The number of their victims could be in the thousands.”

A legal defender for Argentine abuse survivors, Juan Pablo Gallego, says that Pope Francis is “now in exile in Rome – has found his refuge there, so to speak”. Gallego adds that in Argentina Francis faces “the suspicion that he protected for years rapists and abusers of children.”

He cites the example of Fr Julio César Grassi, who is now in prison for raping teenage boys. Francis had been Grassi’s confessor and ordered a legal report to defend Grassi against the charges.

Gallego says that in 2006 he had a conversation with the then Cardinal Bergoglio. “He was withdrawn and mistrusting, he said no word about the fact that the Church paid Grassi’s lawyers. The current image of an open, sympathetic Pope Francis does not fit the man whom I sat in front of at the time.”

Hat tip: Mark Wauck:

Monica Showalter adds:

Thomas is right. The loss of the big German establishment magazine does signal a sea change.

One, the charges themselves are of the same kind that Cardinal Carlo Maria Vigano laid out - coverup - yet are coming from a very different source on another continent. Vigano was an insider, he knew what the diplomatic correspondence said, he knew who was under sanction and who was in and out. These charges from Buenos Aires are from ordinary lay people, people who are not insiders, but people who who were trying to send information. It signals a pattern. Pope Francis's Vatican apologists likely can't call these types of charges political.

Here is another element worth looking at. In Chile, next door to Argentina, Pope Francis found himself in a lot of hot water after he first dismissed allegations of coverups against Chile's cardinals as the work of liars, and then was met with an outcry. He backtracked, apologized, and had the whole Chilean clerical leadership resign. It sounds very similar to how he ran things in Argentina, because his response was the same. But he'd have a harder time still dismissing the entire Argentine leadership for the same thing, given that he likely had a role in appointing them.

Here is the second element suggesting a sea change: German money pretty much finances the Catholic Church in Latin America. That's the word of a Vatican linked source I have. It explains why the Church is so incredibly leftwing in that area, and socialist liberation theology runs rampant. It's basically eurotrash-thinking grafted onto a New World virgin culture, as some such as Alvaro Vargas Llosa have observed in other contexts, the Germans stamping their romantic worldview onto parts afar, there's nothing inherently leftwing about Latin America except for that German money influence artificially inflating it. With the German influence strong in the Latin American church, what does it say that Der Spiegel is pointing the finger now? 

Update: More on the still-untranslated Speigel article via Lifesite News:

According to the magazine, one cardinal not only called the Pope effectively a liar, but he also said: “From the beginning, I did not believe one word of his.” The Spiegel's own comments on this papacy, as we shall see, are no less strong.

One of the high-ranking interlocutors told the journalistic team that, in the Vatican there reigns “a climate of fear and of uncertainty.” “Francis is very good at getting things in motion,” a German prelate is quoted as saying, “but when, in the end, there is only wavering, that for sure does not help.” Examples of such waverings are to be found, as the Spiegel says, in Pope Francis' handling of the debate about Communion for Protestant spouses of Catholics. One German cardinal tells the magazine about lies, intrigues, “and a Holy Father who, unlike anyone before him, puts into doubt the truth of the Faith.”

Marie Collins, herself a prominent abuse victim and advocate for victims, speaks about the Pope's and the Vatican's handling of abuse cases thus: “beautiful words in the public and [then] opposite actions behind closed doors.”

The Spiegel comments that the Pope might very well ignore the “indications of crimes within his own inner circle” because “he is interested, for reasons of power politics, in keeping one or another cardinal or bishop in his office.” So, in the German magazine's eyes, “Francis [thereby] makes himself vulnerable.” He fights for years “against global capitalism, but took – like his predecessors – sums of millions from the now-rejected Cardinal McCarrick which he himself had received from donors.” Additionally, “the Pope praises the value of the traditional family, but then surrounds himself with counselors and collaborators who live the opposite – in a more or less obvious concubinage with representatives of either sex.”

“Is the Pope still master of the situation?” asks the Spiegel. It points out that “criticism [of this papacy] meanwhile comes from a circle much larger than that of globally connected arch-conservatives.” One of the problems of this Pope, according to the magazine, is that “he is silent in delicate matters” such as the dubia of the four cardinals concerning his post-apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, but also concerning the petition of 30,000 women who have recently requested that he answer the questions arising from the Viganò report. He does not answer these women, he is mute, and “he, rather, leaves the accusation unchallenged that he has known, since June 2013, about the doings of the child-abuser McCarrick.”