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British Prime Minister Theresa May got plenty of attention for her trip to Africa last week. Videos of her dancing — one with secondary students who greeted her in South Africa and another with her dancing with young scouts in Kenya — went viral.

But May’s dance-floor diplomacy didn’t overshadow her larger mission in Africa, which was to forge business ties for a post-Brexit Britain. In Cape Town, she pledged more than $5 billion to support African markets and also promised that her country would overtake the United States to become the biggest investor in Africa out of the G-7 countries.

Cheta Nwanze, an analyst at the Lagos-based research firm SBM Intelligence says Britain is desperately trying to find new trade partners. “Because Brexit isn’t working out as it had expected,” he said. “Brexit is seven or eight months away now and they’re so many contentious issues that will need to be resolved.”

Playing catch up to China

German Chancellor Angela Merkel made her own recent foray to Africa, visiting Senegal, Nigeria and Ghana, also seeking economic benefit. China has played the role of Africa’s largest trading partner for the past nine consecutive years, and both Britain and Germany have a lot of catching up to do.

According to British government figures, the country’s total trade with Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya — the countries May visited — amounted to $16.9 billion in 2016. That’s less than 2.5 percent of the $712 billion in goods and services that Britain exchanged with the European Union in the same year, Reuters reported.

Meanwhile, Germany declared 2017 a key year for its Africa policy and hosted African presidents in Berlin at a G-20 summit to boost private investment. However, to date, Germany only has about 1,000 companies that are active in Africa.

In comparison, China has 10,000 firms in Africa. It has financed more than 3,000 infrastructure projects on the continent, building thousands of kilometers of highways, generating thousands of megawatts of electricity and creating thousands of jobs across the continent.

“China is challenging all the Western countries, even the United States. China has no historical background of colonialism [in Africa] so many Africans prefer working with China,” said Bakary Sambe, a development and peace studies analyst in Senegal.

This week, several African presidents are in China for the 2018 Forum for Africa-China Cooperation, which China’s Foreign Minister Wang Li described as the biggest summit of all time.

But, Nii Akwuetteh, a prominent independent Ghanaian policy analyst based in Washington, D.C., recommends African politicians, businesses and civil society members be wary of both the West and the East.

“If I had my way, they would be far more vigilant and tougher against Merkel, against May, and even against the Chinese, because all these global powers are rushing to Africa now and they all claim that they love Africa and they want to help. Well, we all heard that before and it led to slavery and it led to colonialism,” he said.

Stopping migration

Akwuetteh said May and Merkel are motivated in part by a desire to stop the waves of African migrants showing up on Europe’s shores.

“They are doing this because their populace don’t like Africans. Merkel is very clear, that’s why she’s doing this — we want to create jobs in Africa so you all don’t come to Europe,” he said.

Merkel said she wants to work with these governments to tackle issues the three countries are struggling with, such as the Boko Haram insurgency and widespread unemployment.

One of the agreement she said was an MOU signed between German automaker Volkswagen and partners in Ghana and Nigeria. Volkswagen announced last week it would assemble cars in Ghana and make Nigeria an automotive hub.

Ayisha Osori, the head of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, commends this effort and says African leaders need to acknowledge the reasons why citizens are risking their lives to flee.

“It’s a good deal to create more jobs to keep people away from migrating, coming over to Europe in less numbers. Looking at the people who try to cross the desert, that go by sea or by boat, what are they running away from? What is it about their lives that is making them to take such dangerous journeys?” Osori asks.

U.S. role?

In this scramble for Africa, the United States looms in the background, contributing mostly military support. The Brookings Institution says U.S.-Africa relations will not reach their potential if the executive office fails to provide diplomatic and policy leadership.

But U.S. President Donald Trump has shown little interest in the continent and angered many Africans with offensive remarks.

Though Trump has no announced plans of going to Africa, first lady Melania Trump announced in August that she will visit — without the president.
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Pope Francis on Monday recommended silence and prayer to counter those who “only seek scandal,” division and destruction in what appeared to be an indirect response to allegations that he had covered up for a U.S. cardinal embroiled in sex abuse scandals.

Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former papal envoy in Washington, stunned the faithful last month by claiming Francis allegedly lifted unconfirmed Vatican sanctions against disgraced U.S. prelate Theodore McCarrick and demanding that the pope resign.

“With people lacking good will, with people who only seek scandal, who seek only division, who seek only destruction, even within the family — silence, prayer” is the path to take, Francis said in his homily during morning Mass at the Vatican hotel where he lives.

Hours after Vigano made the claim in a statement given to conservative Catholic news media, Francis had told journalists seeking his response that he “won’t say a word” about the claims by the disgruntled former diplomat.

In his homily Monday, Francis indicated he takes his cue from God on whether to speak out or not about Vigano’s allegations.

“May the Lord give us the grace to discern when we should speak and when we should stay silent,” Francis said. “This applies to every part of life: to work, at home, in society.”

“Truth is meek, truth is silent, truth isn’t noisy,” the pope said in his Mass remarks.

Vigano has contended that while Benedict XVI was pope, he had sanctioned McCarrick, including avoiding public life, but that Francis later allegedly lifted the punishment.

During the years that McCarrick was purportedly under sanctions, the cardinal celebrated public Masses and attended other public functions, even before Francis became pontiff. Vigano claimed that he told Francis, shortly after he was elected pontiff in 2013, that McCarrick had been given sanctions by Benedict.

Weeks before Vigano went public with his claims, Francis in July yanked McCarrick’s cardinal rank after U.S. church panel deemed credible the American had sexually abused an altar boy. McCarrick has denied wrongdoing in that case.

It was the first time that a prelate had lost his cardinal’s rank in a sex abuse scandal, and the move was widely viewed as an indication that Francis was trying to make good on promises to crack down on clerics who either were found to have abused minors or adults or who covered up for priests who did.

The Vatican let several days pass before attempting to knock down some of Vigano’s contentions. On Sunday night, a former Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, and his English-language assistant, the Rev. Thomas Rosica, jointly disputed the prelate’s claims about an embarrassing encounter he arranged with U.S. anti-marriage crusader Kim Davis during Francis’ visit in the United States in 2015.

Vigano last week had insisted that Francis knew very well who Davis was and that the Vatican’s top brass had given advance approval.

Rosica said Vigano had told them that Francis had chewed him out for “deceiving” him about the meeting and for having not told the pope that Davis had been married four times. Lombardi, who served as spokesman for both Benedict and for a few years also for Francis, contended that the papal envoy should have figure out that the meeting would have caused a furor.

The Davis meeting contributed to chilly relations between Francis and the former diplomat.

Following decades of complaints by faithful in the United States and elsewhere that they were sexually abused as minors or adults by priests, or that their abusers were quietly shuffled from parish to parish, the church, including at the Vatican, has been struggling to effectively deal with the problem, including the role of higher-ups in hiding the abuses.
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A key opponent of high-tech, automated weapons known as “killer robots” is blaming countries like the U.S. and Russia for blocking consensus at a U.N.-backed conference, where most countries wanted to ensure that humans stay at the controls of lethal machines.

Coordinator Mary Wareham of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots spoke Monday after experts from dozens of countries agreed before dawn Saturday at the U.N. in Geneva on 10 “possible guiding principles” about such “Lethal Automated Weapons Systems.”

Point 2 said: “Human responsibility for decisions on the use of weapons systems must be retained since accountability cannot be transferred to machines.”

Wareham said such language wasn’t binding, adding that “it’s time to start laying down some rules now.”

Members of the LAWS conference will meet again in November.

 
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The U.N. refugee agency says people smugglers are taking greater risks to ferry their human cargo toward Europe as Libya’s coast guard intercepts more and more boats carrying migrants, increasing the likelihood that those on board may die during the Mediterranean journeys.

That’s one of the key findings from the latest UNHCR report about efforts to reach Europe. The report, released early Monday and titled “Desperate Journeys,” says that even though the number of crossings and deaths has plunged compared to recent years, the voyage is more deadly in percentage terms for those who venture across.

The report says 2,276 people died last year while trying to cross, or one death for every 42 arrivals.

This year, it’s 1,095 deaths, or one out of every 18 arrivals. In June alone, the proportion hit one death for every seven arrivals.

On the Central Mediterranean route so far this year, there have been 10 separate incidents in which 50 or more people died — most after departing from Libya. Seven of those incidents have been since June alone, UNHCR said.

“The reason the traffic has become more deadly is that the traffickers are taking more risk, because there is more surveillance exercised by the Libyan coast guards,” said Vincent Cochetel, UNHCR’s special envoy for the central Mediterranean. “They are trying to cut the costs: It costs them more to keep those people here longer in their warehouses, under captivity.”

Libyan authorities intercepted or rescued 18,400 people between August last year and July this year — a 38-percent increase from the same period of 2016 and 2017. Arrivals by sea from Libya to Europe plummeted 82 percent in those comparable periods, to 30,800 in the more recent one.

UNHCR says a growing worry these days is deaths on land by people trying to get to Libya in the first place, or getting stuck in squalid, overcrowded detention centers: Many get returned there after failing to cross by sea to Europe.

“The problems after disembarkation (is that) those people are sent back to detention centers, and many disappear,” Cochetel said. “Many are sold to militias, and to traffickers, and people employing them without paying them.”

He said the drop in departures means that traffickers attempt to “monetize their investment, which means they have to exploit more people. That results in more cases of slavery, forced labor, prostitution of those people — because they (smugglers) want to make money on those people.”

Would-be workers and migrants are still pouring into Libya: Some are fleeing injustice, abuse or autocrats in their home countries further south in Africa. Others are looking for work in the oil industry or agriculture.

“I think you have more deaths on land,” Cochetel said, referring to treks across the desert in Sudan, Algeria, Chad and Niger. “Many people in Libya are reporting having seeing people dead in the desert on the way to Libya.”

In Libya, instability continues even seven years after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi. French medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said Friday that fighting between rival militias in Tripoli, the capital, has endangered the lives of people trapped there and worsened humanitarian needs — especially at migrant detention centers.

Cochetel said Europe — where some countries have shown “appalling” squabbles about who would take in rescue ships carrying migrants — should look at the root causes of such journeys. European populations need to shun anti-migrant rhetoric and realize that figures are down sharply, and migrant flows are clearly manageable at current levels, he said.

“Europe has to show the lead, has to be exemplary in its response, but it’s quite clear that it’s already too late when the people are in Libya,” he said. “We need to work downstream in country of first asylum, in country of origin, and that takes time.”

 
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Human Rights Watch is calling for an immediate end to all arms sales to Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the bombing of a schoolbus last month that killed 51 people, including 40 children.

In a report released Sunday, the HRW called the attack an “apparent war crime,” saying it only added to the Saudi-led coalition’s “already gruesome track record of killing civilians at weddings, funerals, hospitals and schools in Yemen.”

The coalition, which has the support of the United States, has been fighting the Houthi rebels since March 2015. The coalition backs Yemen’s internationally recognized government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and aims to restore it to power.

The HRW report comes just a day after the coalition said it has accepted the conclusions of its investigative body that there were “mistakes” made in the attack, including failing to take measures to minimize collateral damage.

The coalition vowed to “take all the legal measures to hold accountable those who were proven to have committed mistakes” once it officially receives the findings. It also pledged to coordinate with Yemen’s government to compensate civilians.

The U.S. State Department on Sunday welcomed the coalition’s statement as “an important first step toward full transparency and accountability.”

But, Bill Van Esveld, senior children’s rights researcher for HRW, urged the U.S. and other countries to “immediately stop weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and support strengthening the independent U.N. inquiry into violations in Yemen, or risk being complicit in future atrocities.”
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The archbishop of Philadelphia has asked Pope Francis to cancel a bishops’ conference focusing on youth in the wake of the child sex abuse crisis roiling the Catholic Church.

A spokesman for the archdiocese confirmed Saturday that Archbishop Charles Chaput made the request by letter, but he declined further comment, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

The Youth Synod, which would include bishops from the around the world, has been planned for two years and its website says it is to be focused on “young people, the faith and vocational discernment.” An international panel of young people is expected to join the council of bishops for the event.

“I have written the Holy Father and called on him to cancel the forthcoming synod on young people,” Chaput said at a conference Thursday at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, according to LifeSite News, a conservative Catholic website. “Right now, the bishops would have absolutely no credibility in addressing this topic.”

Instead, Chaput asked that the synod be refocused on the life of bishops.

A nearly 900-page grand jury report released last month said more than 300 Catholic priests abused at least a thousand children over the past seven decades in six Pennsylvania dioceses, and senior figures in the church hierarchy systematically covered up complaints.

A description of the purpose of the Oct. 3-28 synod at the Vatican begins “Taking care of young people is not an optional task for the Church, but an integral part of her vocation and mission in history.”
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A new U.S. study finds that when temperatures around the world start creeping up, insects that eat crops will not only become hungrier, their numbers will grow. Scientists say this will mean more insect damage to wheat, corn and rice crops, and therefore less food on the dinner table. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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Russia is not giving up on efforts to destabilize Afghanistan and drive divisions between the United States and its coalition partners, according to the outgoing commander of U.S. forces in the country.

The commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan and of Operation Resolute Support, General John Nicholson, is scheduled to step down Sunday after serving in the position for more than two years.

But before relinquishing command, he took time to cast doubts on Russia’s intentions in the region, despite recent overtures from Moscow to help the Taliban reconcile with the Afghan government.

“We know that Russia is attempting to undercut our military gains and years of military progress in Afghanistan, and make partners question Afghanistan’s stability,” Nicholson said in an email to Voice of America, following on questions from his August 22 briefing with Pentagon reporters.

“It is no secret that Russia seeks any opportunity it can find to drive a wedge between the United States and our Central Asian partners, including Afghanistan,” Nicholson added.

Aid to Taliban

U.S. and Afghan officials have previously accused Russia of meddling in Afghanistan by providing Taliban insurgents with both weapons and training.

Moscow has rejected the allegations, saying it has only political ties with the Taliban. Still, Russia has faced growing suspicion from the U.S. and its allies, who say the Kremlin has been increasingly working to expand its influence in Afghanistan and beyond.

Most recently, the U.S. and Russia have been competing over efforts to kick-start peace negotiations between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

Russia was set to host both parties, along with the U.S. and other countries, for talks starting September 4, but was forced to postpone after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani declined the invitation.

The U.S. also has been hoping for talks between the government and the Taliban.

“We talk about an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned reconciliation process,” U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis said during a briefing with reporters this past week. “We believe that the best way to get there is to ensure Taliban recognizes they can’t win on the battlefield, they must negotiate.”

But while U.S. officials have touted what they see are signs of progress, including increased support for a peace process from various sectors of the Afghan population, the government’s recent cease-fire offer to the Taliban appears to have fallen on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials have been angered by what they see as Russian efforts to derail peace and stabilization efforts with disinformation campaigns.

​Charges repeated

Just over a week ago, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova raised concerns about “unidentified” helicopters flying missions in support of fighters for the Islamic State terror group, also known as IS-Khorasan or IS-K, in the northern Sar-e-Pul province, suggesting the U.S. and NATO might be responsible.

“Who is arming the terrorists and secretly creating their bases?” she asked. “Why is this happening if NATO command is effectively in control of Afghanistan’s airspace?”

Pentagon officials rejected the suggestion of U.S. or NATO involvement as “completely untrue,” noting it was not the first time Moscow had levied such charges.

“As they [Russia] perpetuate false narratives about ISIS-K, the United States and the Afghan Special Security Forces eliminated the Jowzjan ISIS-K enclave and are killing ISIS-K leaders and fighters in Nangarhar,” Nicholson said in his statement to VOA.

Still, the outgoing commander said he held out hope Russia could play a constructive role. 

“We have shared interests with Russia in Afghanistan — peace, counterterrorism and counternarcotics,” Nicholson said. “We hope to see Russia support Afghanistan and the NATO-led coalition in these areas going forward.”

VOA’s Ayaz Gul contributed to this report.
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No one knows what will happen in the next 48 hours in Chemnitz, the Saxon town which this week saw the worst rioting in Germany in three decades, with mobs of far-right supporters and soccer hooligans overwhelming local police and beating anyone in the streets who appeared to be a foreigner while flashing illegal Nazi salutes.

Federal authorities and neighboring German states have sent police reinforcements to Saxony to confront any repeat of the violence seen on Monday, when more than 6,000 anti-migrant protesters rallied to vent their fury at the stabbing of a 35-year-old German man, Daniel Hillig, during a brawl with a pair of asylum-seekers from Syria and Iraq.

The stabbing came at the end of a street festival celebrating the 875th anniversary of Chemnitz, a declining industrial town of drab Communist-era apartment blocks with a population of 250,000.

With four anti-migrant rallies scheduled for Saturday alone — one organized by Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party that last year became the largest opposition faction in the German parliament, the Bundestag, as well as counterprotests planned by left wing groups — police are preparing for the worst.

So, too, are many store owners and the 20,000 migrants who live in Chemnitz, nestled in the foothills of the Ore Mountains, which during the Communist era was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Migrants contacted on social media say they fear for the worst.

“I won’t be going outside today [Saturday],” said Farid, a 46-year-old Moroccan who asked that his full name not be published. “And neither will my wife nor daughters,” he said.

“Will we ever be safe again?” he asked. Like many other migrants, what shocked him the most was spotting neighbors among the rioters screaming for foreigners to go home. “I wasn’t born here but my two daughters were — this is their home,” he added. He says the rioting this week, the pitched street battles between overwhelmed local police and the protesters and the hunting down of foreigners for beatings, have convinced him that a tipping point may have been reached in Chemnitz and Saxony — and “possibly in Germany as well.”

Simmering tensions

He’s not alone in harboring such a fear.

Alara, a 36-year-old Turkish woman, says she, too, has been shocked by the participation in the violent anti-migrant protests of middle-class German “neighbors and co-workers.” “I thought they were my friends,” she laments.

In the middle of the week, a shocked German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her fear that far right rioting, along with Hitler salutes that are banned in the country, and the confidence protesters demonstrated in flaunting their affection for a dark German past, represented a threat to the very underpinnings of the post-Second World War state.

“There is video footage of chases, rioting and hatred on the street. And that has nothing to do with our constitutional state,” she said. Tensions over migrants have roiled German politics since 2015, when Merkel announced an open-door policy for war refugees from the Middle East that saw more than 1.2 million admitted.  

Merkel’s controversial immigration policy fueled the rise of the AfD. The group’s electoral performance in last year’s elections, in which it seized nearly 100 seats in the Bundestag, marked a startling new phase in the party’s progress from the fringe of German politics closer to the center of power in Berlin. For far right opponents, the AfD’s election success, built on menacing social media propaganda playing on fears of Islam and Muslim criminality and on foreigners in general, represented a door opening on a German past they thought long buried.

The anti-migrant violence this week in Chemnitz — and the threat of more to come — is prompting questions about whether that door is opening even wider in Germany.

Well organized

Aside from the participation of “ordinary” locals, officials acknowledge they also were taken aback by the speed with which the anti-migrant protesters were reinforced, as well as the level of organization and coordination displayed by a variety of far right groups, including AfD, Pegida and the National Democratic Party. These groups glorify the Third Reich and have averted efforts by the government to ban it.

Saxony’s interior minister, Roland Woller, told media this week that known soccer hooligan groups with strong ties to the far right — and some with solidarity links to Russian fan-clubs and martial arts groups —  helped to mobilize people from across Germany and transport them to join the street battle.

German officials blame orchestrated “fake news” peddled by far right groups on social media sites for helping to stoke the rioting that broke out Monday. “We have to acknowledge that mobilization on the internet was stronger than in the past,” said Michael Kretschmer, the state prime minister of Saxony. The trouble was fueled partially by false claims that the stabbed man had intervened to protect a woman from being raped by asylum-seekers.

The showdown in Chemnitz could continue well into next week. A concert is planned for Monday by a left-wing band. But it is the planned Saturday night marches that now have the focus. In a statement announcing its march, the AfD called Daniel Hillig “the next, avoidable victim of an irresponsible government policy that accepts the multiple deaths of natives with icy coldness.”

“The cartel media have tried to make Chemnitz, the city of the victims, into a city of the perpetrators,” the AfD statement said.

AfD senses a huge opportunity in Chemnitz, say analysts, and is determined to stoke Germany’s political divisions over migration and national identity, hoping the agitation will translate into greater electoral gains in the future.  

 
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Poland says it lost more than 5 million citizens and over $54 billion dollars (46.6 billion euros) worth of assets under the Nazi German occupation of the country during World War II.

A parliamentary commission announced the numbers as part of the current Polish government’s declared intent to seek damages from Germany.

Poland spent decades under Soviet domination after the war and wasn’t able to seek damages independently. However, Germany is making payments to Polish survivors of Nazi atrocities.

Preliminary calculations done for the commission put the number of Polish citizens killed from 1939 to 1945 at 5.1 million, including 90 percent of Poland’s Jewish population.

Losses in cities were estimated to be worth 53 billion zlotys ($14 billion; 12 billion euros). Additional losses in agriculture and transportation infrastructure also were factored in.
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The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) warns asylum seekers and migrants who came ashore on the Greek islands are living in conditions unfit for human habitation. The agency is urging the Greek government to speed up the  transfer of these individuals to the mainland so they can receive proper care.

According to UNHCR, thousands of asylum seekers and migrants who made the perilous journey across the Aegean Sea are forced to live in squalid, overcrowded centers on the Greek islands of Lesbos, Samos, Chios and Kos.

For example, the agency said more than 7,000 asylum-seekers and migrants on Lesbos are crammed into shelters built to accommodate just 2,000 people, one-quarter of them children.

UNHCR spokesman Charlie Yaxley said these conditions are having a devastating impact on peoples’ well-being.

“We are seeing increasing numbers of people including children presenting with mental health problems,” he said. “… We are seeing rising levels of sexual assaults because there is insufficient security in place and the sanitary facilities as well. On recent missions to the islands, staff have commented that the sanitary facilities are essentially unusable in some cases.”

Yaxley noted an average of 114 people are arriving on the islands every day — more than 70 percent are families from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He said the new arrivals are adding to the congestion and deteriorating conditions.

The UNHCR said Greek authorities must do more to overcome bureaucratic delays that are preventing the speedy transfer of people to the mainland. If no ready solution can be found, it said extraordinary measures should be considered, including the use of emergency accommodations, hotels, and other alternative housing facilities.

However, at the request of the Greek government, the UNHCR said it has “exceptionally agreed to continue its support in transport of asylum-seekers to the mainland in September in order to avoid further delays.”
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The official media outlet of Russia-backed separatists in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine confirmed rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko had been killed on Friday.

The Donetsk News Agency said in a statement on its website that Zakharchenko had been killed in an explosion in central Donetsk, citing the rebel leader’s administration.
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Pope Francis was described Thursday by a top aide as ‘serene’ in the face of the unprecedented public skirmishing breaking out among Catholic prelates over an explosive charge that the pontiff knew about sexual misconduct allegations against a U.S. cardinal but chose to ignore them.

The Vatican’s secretary of state said Francis is maintaining his grace despite “bitterness and concern” in the Vatican over the accusation leveled against him by a onetime top Catholic envoy, who has demanded the Pope resign.

The Pope’s accuser, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador and a doctrinal opponent of Francis, has gone into hiding after making his claim last Sunday in a scathing 11-page document that was crafted with the assistance of a well-known Italian journalist and a stalwart critic of the Pope. According to Vigano, Francis ignored misconduct allegations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

The incendiary document, which also warned of a homosexual culture in the church, was leaked to several conservative Catholic newspapers and blogs, all determined foes of Francis. They agreed to publish it on the second and final day of Francis’s trip to Ireland, in a coordinated effort, say Francis loyalists, to cause him maximum damage.

The publication of the letter upended the visit to Ireland, where Pope Francis had hoped to stanch the damage being done to the Holy See by the clerical sex abuse crisis that has roiled the Roman Catholic Church worldwide for decades. Just two weeks before the Ireland trip, the Church was rocked by further clerical abuse allegations with the release of a grand jury report in the U.S. which detailed the abuse of children in six Pennsylvania dioceses over the past seven decades by hundreds of “predator priests.”

In Ireland, Pope Francis met Irish abuse victims and asked for the faithful to forgive the church for its failings. “We ask forgiveness for the times that we did not show [abuse] survivors compassion or the justice they deserve in the search for truth,” he said. And he then added: “We ask forgiveness for members of the Church hierarchy who did not take care of these situations and kept quiet.”

But Vigano says Francis is one of the church leaders who’s colluded in covering up abuse or has been too ready to overlook abuse allegations when leveled against friends and progressive allies. He has also claimed that a tolerant attitude towards homosexuality in the Vatican — even alleging a progressive gay cabal in the upper echelons of the Church — is the root cause of clerical sex abuse. Francis supporters scoff at that charge, noting that clerical sex abuse has been going on for decades and for most of that time traditionalists were in control of the Vatican.

‘Conspiracy of silence’

Midweek Vigano reemerged to give an interview to La Verità newspaper, saying he spoke up out of a sense of duty to the Catholic Church and not because the Pope had passed him over for promotion. “I have never had feelings of vendetta or rancor,” he said, adding that there is a “conspiracy of silence” in the Church “not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia.”

Vigano says Francis was aware of the grave allegations of sexual misconduct against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who’s been accused of abusing young priests and molesting seminarians for decades. Unlike his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, who imposed sanctions on McCarrick, Francis and his circle of advisers chose to rehabilitate the U.S. cardinal, argues Vigano.

The claims are shaking Francis’s five-year papacy.

Amid the swirl of charge and counter-charge between church liberals and conservatives locked in a power struggle, there’s mounting anxiety in the Vatican that traditionalists, opposed to the Pope’s efforts to make the Church more inclusive and less rigid doctrinally, are determined to use the clerical sex abuse scandal to gain politically.

The pope’s supporters say Francis’ doctrinal opponents won’t be satisfied until they have either forced him to resign, or so damaged him that he’s stripped of the authority needed to drive the reforms they’re determined to halt. They say traditionalists have been emboldened by the resignation of Benedict, whose stepping down as leader of the Catholic Church in 2013 made him the first pope to relinquish the office since 1415, setting a modern-day precedent for pontiffs not having to stay in office until they die.

Abuse survivors are also suspicious of the motives of Vigano and the circle of traditionalists supporting him. Despite their own frustrations with Francis at what they see as a failure by his Vatican to take concrete steps to root out corrupt clergy, they worry traditionalists are enlisting homophobia in their campaign against Francis and are not truly focused on the well-being of abuse survivors.

Not a word

Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, one of the Pope’s closest advisers, dismissed Vigano’s attacks, telling La Repubblica newspaper Thursday, “Transforming information of a private nature into a bombshell headline that explodes around the world damaging the faith of many people doesn’t seem to me to be a correct action.” But Maradiaga did not engage with the details of Vigano’s central charge — that the pope ignored misconduct allegations against McCarrick, who last month resigned, becoming the first cardinal to do so since 1927.

Francis, too, has continued to remain silent about McCarrick.

The 81-year-old pope told journalists who accompanied him on his two-day visit to Ireland that he wouldn’t comment. Asked in an impromptu press conference on board his plane on the return to Rome about Vigano’s accusation, the Pope said he left it up to the journalists to judge for themselves. “I won’t say a word about it,” he said.

Vatican analysts say the Holy See appears to be hoping that by ignoring the substance of the claim against Francis, the storm can be ridden out.  But they warn that appears to be a forlorn hope — by shunning the charge, Francis is fueling it and prompting the question, ‘why won’t the pope answer?’ If the claim is inaccurate, “why wouldn’t the pope correct it, just as he has spoken so openly about so many other things?” queried commentator Tim Stanley in a commentary for the London Sunday Telegraph.

Francis’ conservative critics are gearing up to press formally for an answer. In an open letter to his diocese in Tyler, Texas, Bishop Joseph Strickland midweek said: “Let us be clear that they are still allegations, but as your shepherd I find them to be credible.” He says he will agitate for an investigation.

Other prelates are plotting to do so as well, next month in Rome at a synod of bishops to discuss young people and faith.

The Diocese of Dallas in Texas has petitioned the Pope to hold a special synod, or summit, of bishops on the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Progressives started to rally Friday around Francis with prelates from Latin America, the pope’s home continent, as well as Portugal  leading the charge.

Of the accusations, Cardinal António dos Santos Marto, of Fatima, Portugal, told the Observador newspaper, “It’s a campaign organized by ultra-conservatives to mortally wound the pope.”

Marto predicted Francis will be strengthened by the controversy, adding, however, that “in this moment it’s necessary for the entire Church to manifest her support for the pope.” He said Francis may soon switch tactics and address head-on the accusations against him.

Francis also received backing from a top aide to his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Archbishop Georg Ganswein dismissed Vigano’s claim that Benedict had informed Francis of the misconduct allegations against McCarrick. He told Italian newspapers Friday: “It’s all rubbish.”

 
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