Month: August 2018

The Turkish lira weakened on Tuesday as investors weighed up Turkey’s efforts to manage its rift with the United States after Finance Minister Berat Albayrak said U.S. trade sanctions against Ankara could destabilize the Middle East.

The currency has lost about 38 percent of its value against the dollar this year due to a sell-off accelerated by a row with Washington over an American evangelical Christian pastor detained in Turkey on terrorism charges.

More broadly, investors are worried about the direction of monetary policy under President Tayyip Erdogan. The president, a self-described “enemy of interest rates” has repeatedly put public pressure on the central bank and picked Albayrak, his son-in-law, as finance minister.

The attendant sell-off in the lira has raised concerns about the impact on the broader economy — given Turkey’s reliance on dollar-denominated energy imports — and a possible surge in bad loans in the banking sector.

At 1527 GMT, the lira stood at 6.2561 against the dollar, weakening from a close of 6.1200 on Monday, when it weakened to near 6.3 before rebounding in its first day of trade after a week-long holiday.

The main stock index rose 2.83 percent by Tuesday’s close to 93,866.94 points.

“At this point in time Turkey has become pretty much un-tradable,” said Tim Ash of BlueBay Asset Management in emailed comments. “The market wants to see specific delivery on policy whether that is monetary, fiscal or action to clear up problems in the banking sector.”

Germany denied a report that it might provide financial aid to Turkey to help it weather the currency crisis.

Also on Tuesday ratings agency Moody’s downgraded 20 Turkish financial institutions, saying there were signs of substantial increase in risk of a downside scenario. It said Turkey’s operating environment had deteriorated beyond previous expectations.

‘Turkey must reform itself’

Facing economic pressure from the United States, Turkey has signalled a wish to improve strained ties with the European Union, which it still aspires to join despite disagreements.

After meeting his French counterpart in Paris on Monday, Albayrak also took aim at the United States, saying U.S. sanctions could ultimately aggravate the region’s terrorism and refugee crises.

Both Erdogan and Albayrak are also set to visit Germany at the end of September.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Germany was in early stage talks to provide emergency financial aid to Turkey, fearing its economic troubles could spread to Europe and further destabilise the Middle East. But a German official denied this.

“You can’t do much from the outside but to stress that Turkey must reform itself,” a second official told Reuters.

U.S. President Donald Trump this month authorized a doubling of duties on aluminium and steel imported from Turkey, triggering retaliatory measures from Ankara.

Investors are also worried by a U.S. Treasury investigation into state-owned Turkish lender Halkbank, which could face a potentially hefty fine over allegations of busting sanctions on Iran. The bank has said all its transactions were legal.

Turkey and the United States are also at odds over their diverging interests in Syria and U.S. objections to Ankara’s plan to buy Russian defence systems.

Separately, Ankara announced a new campaign on Tuesday to support the real estate sector, offering a 10 percent discount on some home sales. Under the campaign, any price increases due to rising exchange rates will be discounted from the cost of the residence, the environment and urbanization minister said.
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Sizzling weather this summer will put pressure on almost 200 governments to reach a deal in Poland in December on the details of a global plan to limit climate change, the incoming president of the U.N. talks said.

Environment ministers will meet in Katowice, the heart of Poland’s coal-producing region, Silesia, to agree on rules for the 2015 Paris climate accord. That accord set a sweeping goal of ending the fossil fuel era this century, but the text was vague on details.

“Paris is empty without Katowice,” Michal Kurtyka, a former deputy energy minister of Poland who will preside at the December 3-14 talks, told Reuters.

Poland, which generates most of its electricity from coal, is hosting the annual U.N. climate talks for the third time.

“The Paris Agreement includes certain principles. However, the way they will be implemented will be described in the Katowice package. So the more detailed and concrete it is, the better,” Kurtyka said.

Hot weather this summer that set off wildfires from California to Greece has made officials more determined to reach a detailed deal in Katowice, he said.

“For sure this is something that affected millions of people all over the world. … Societies in particular countries will act on politicians. I think that this will increase political determination for the solutions to be as concrete and as

detailed as possible,” Kurtyka said.

Bangkok session

Many issues remain to be discussed at an extra session in Bangkok next month, he said, where “a vision of the whole should be built.”

Some of the sticking points include the way the countries report on their emission reductions, adapting to climate change and financing tools, he said.

Environmentalists have complained about foot-dragging by the countries involved. French Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot resigned Tuesday in frustration over sluggish progress on climate goals.

Writing the “rule book” — formally known as “implementation guidelines” — is the biggest test of the international commitment to the Paris Agreement since President Donald Trump said in June last year that he would pull the United States out.

“If some countries, such as for example the U.S., conclude that they are not ready to follow the Paris Agreement direction, then I’d assume that all other countries will seek to keep their presence so that they are part of the agreement,” Kurtyka said.

“I will strive for all parties to become signatories, whereas the question I will ask at the end will be: ‘Do I hear a voice of objection?’ I hope not.”

The choice of Poland for the climate talks is itself a point of contention, because of its dependence on coal. In February, the European Union’s top court said the country had failed to uphold air-quality standards, one of several environmental conflicts between Poles and the EU.

“The opinions that Poland is not a reliable climate talks host, due to the significant share of coal in power production, are formulated from the EU perspective. The world is more diverse than that,” Kurtyka said.

Kurtyka was appointed the climate talks president in April. He replaced the former Environment Minister Jan Szyszo, who had been initially named to preside at the conference in Katowice.

Szyszko had approved the increased logging in the ancient Bialowieza Forest in 2016, another of Poland’s conflicts with the European Union.
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Supporters of Pope Francis have rushed to his defense after a former top Vatican official launched an unprecedented attack on him, a move they say

dangerously escalates a campaign to weaken his papacy by conservatives who condemn him as too liberal.

Francis’ supporters say the accusations in Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s 11-page public statement aim to pave the way for a conservative pope to succeed him who would reverse his openings to divorced and homosexual Catholics.

In the statement published at the weekend, Vigano, the former Vatican ambassador to Washington, called on Francis to resign on the ground that  the pope knew for years about the sexual misconduct of an American cardinal and did nothing about it.

Vigano said he told the pope himself five years ago, little more than three months after Francis’ election. He included no supporting documents in the statement and has not been reachable for comment since it was published.

On his flight home from Ireland on Sunday, Francis told reporters he would “not say one word” about the accusations. “Read the document carefully and judge it for yourselves,” he said.

Supporters say the statement contains holes and contradictions and point to the fact that Vigano wrote it with a journalist who has been critical of Francis as evidence that it forms part of an ideological anti-Francis strategy, which the

journalist denies.

Both sides were digging in for what they have cast as a potentially defining battle over Francis’ push for a more inclusive church.

Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark said the statement was full of “factual errors, innuendo and fearful ideology.”

Vigano’s supporters in Italy and abroad praised the former diplomat as following his conscience.

“Vigano is a loyal churchman. … if he is making these allegations now, and calling for Francis’ resignation, it is for the gravest reasons,” George Weigel, senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said in an email.

Conservatives have previously based their attacks on the pope on doctrinal grounds. Now, his supporters say, they have raised the stakes by accusing the pope and other Vatican and church officials of personally failing to act on a case of sexual misconduct.

Vigano’s statement, signed August 22, was released four days later by conservative media outlets during the pope’s trip to Ireland, where sexual abuse was a main theme.

“It really seems like an obvious move by conservatives to delegitimize Francis,” said David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University in New York. “This whole thing was carefully coordinated with conservative Catholic media and carefully timed.”

Gibson said he believed conservatives were laying the groundwork for one of them to be elected as the next pope by damaging Francis’ legacy before he dies or resigns. “It’s the start of the campaign for the next conclave,” he said.

‘No conspiracy’

The statement was co-written and edited by Italian journalist Marco Tosatti, who publishes a daily blog called Stilum Curie that is critical of Francis.

Tosatti said there was “no conservative conspiracy” behind the statement and that it was released as soon as it had been translated into other languages.

“The fact that it was released while the pope was in Dublin was a mere coincidence,” he said.

Vigano wrote that Francis and his predecessor Benedict, among others, knew for years about sexual misconduct with adult seminarians by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the emeritus archbishop of Washington, who quit last month in disgrace.

In June, American church officials said allegations that McCarrick sexually abused a 16-year-old boy almost 50 years ago were credible and substantiated. That charge, which McCarrick denies, is what led to his resignation. He has not commented on his alleged sexual misconduct with seminarians.

Vigano alleged that Benedict, after being told about the allegations involving McCarrick and the seminarians, ordered McCarrick to retreat to a life of prayer and penitence and refrain from public ministry. Vigano said he could not remember what year the alleged sanction, which was never made public, was imposed. The Vatican usually announces such sanctions.

Vigano said he told Francis everything about McCarrick’s case on June 23, 2013.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, McCarrick’s successor as archbishop of Washington, said in a statement on Monday that Vigano had not produced “any objective, verifiable proof” of his assertion.

McCarrick, who has not been seen in public since his resignation, could not be reached for comment.

Benedict’s secretary, Archbishop Georg Ganswein, told Reuters the former pope had no comment on the statement.

Bloggers and journalists have found pictures of McCarrick at church functions, including at least one in the Vatican, in the years after Vigano said Benedict had ordered the former cardinal out of the public eye.

Small, vocal group

Vigano is part of a small, vocal group of conservative prelates, most of them retired or sidelined by Francis, who have balked at his calls for the church to be more welcoming to homosexuals and divorced Catholics.

Their de facto leader is American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke. In 2016, Burke and three other cardinals wrote a public letter known as The Dubia, accusing Francis of sowing confusion on moral issues.

In April this year, Vigano attended a conservative conference, titled The Limits of Papal Authority, where Burke was the main speaker. Tosatti was also there.

Some conference participants openly referred to Francis as the precursor of the coming of the anti-Christ and the end of the world. The conference agreed to a declaration saying “a grave danger to the faith and the unity of the church” had emerged under Francis.
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The death of Senator John McCain after a year-long battle with brain cancer has drawn an outpouring of condolences from every corner of the globe, some of the most poignant and diverse of which came from southeastern Europe, where the Arizona Republican’s unique brand of personal diplomacy forged bonds with democratic leaders and irritated illiberal regimes.

Known for packing Congressional recesses with extensive global travels, McCain, a war hero, statesman, and international human rights advocate, used his office to shed light on conflicts underreported by major Western news outlets.

“If I learned one thing from John it’s that you cannot protect America sitting in Washington,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who accompanied McCain on nearly 50 trips to Iraqi and Afghan war zones, told Josh Rogin of The Washington Post. “You can’t learn how this world works watching cable news.”

His August 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “We Are All Georgians”—published upon the ceasefire that followed Russia’s invasion of Georgia’s breakaway enclave of Abkhazia—was a dire warning against Western diplomatic complacency. 

“For anyone who thought that stark international aggression was a thing of the past, the last week must have come as a startling wake-up call,” he said of the first major cross-border military invasion on European soil in nearly half a century. “The world has learned at great cost the price of allowing aggression against free nations to go unchecked.”

Penned in the latter stages of his last failed presidential bid, the editorial proved prescient in Ukraine upon Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

“Sad news for all Ukrainian people—a great friend of Ukraine, Senator John McCain, has died,” tweeted Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, whose nation routinely hosted the U.S. legislator.

“We will never forget his invaluable contribution to the development of democracy and freedom in Ukraine and the support of our state.”

Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman lauded McCain as “a real friend and the embodiment of a principled politician,” and Oleksandr Turchynov, Ukraine’s Secretary of National Security and Defense, credited McCain with Kyiv’s ongoing U.S. aid.

“It was thanks to his efforts that Ukraine finally began to receive military aid from the U.S. He was strong and honest person, he always professed his beliefs. We will always remember,” he tweeted.

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Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili called the Arizona senator “a national hero of Georgia whom our people will never forget.”

Margvelashvili’s top diplomat, Davit Zalkaliani, called McCain “a defender of small countries worldwide, fighting for freedom, peace, security and democracy,” echoing sentiments conveyed by Georgia’s ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili, who issued a video condolence calling McCain’s passage “an unbelievable loss for Georgia, and a very huge lost for the world.”

“If 1/3 of the leaders of the west had such a strong willpower [and] bravery, no Russian aggression would have followed in Ukraine and Syria,” tweeted Grigol Vashadze, a presidential candidate for Tbilisi’s opposition United National Movement.

In Moscow, often the target of McCain’s ire, social media commemorations by state officials ranged from stoically frank to outright pugnacious.

“He was neither a friend nor ally of Russia, on the contrary, he was our ardent opponent,” said Russian parliamentarian Leonid Slutsky, a subject of U.S. sanctions, according to The Washington Post. “McCain was an outstanding American hawk.”

Russian legislator Alexei Pushkov used McCain’s own words to ridicule the late senator’s calls to oust Syrian autocrat Bashar al Assad.

“‘Gaddafi is on the way out, next in line with Bashar Assad,’ John McCain said 7 years ago, in August 2011,” wrote Pushkov. “Assad’s overthrow and death did not wait for McCain. Politics and fate decided otherwise. McCain’s plans to restructure the world under the total hegemony of the United States will not come true.”

McCain’s support for expanding NATO by adding members from eastern Europe – some former Warsaw Pact nations while under Soviet control – won him friends there as well. 

“The Senator’s bravery and wisdom were inspiring for Montenegro and a big voice of support in the period when we were making democratic progress towards NATO membership,” said Prime Minister Duško Markovic in an official statement. “Senator John McCain was first of all a sincere friend of Montenegro and we will be forever grateful to him.”

Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who is currently pushing for the passage of a referendum that would open the doors to NATO membership, posted comments on Facebook, lamenting that the world has “lost one of the most dedicated politicians who truly believed in democracy.”

Bosnian Prime Minister Denis Zvizdic offered condolences to McCain’s family on Twitter, while Sarajevo’s Mayor Abdulah Skaka vowed to organize a formal commemoration of the later senator. 

“The Bosnian people especially remember his noble engagement to stop the Bosnian war,” Skaka said. “When he called things by their real names, when he asked for just solutions. We highly appreciate his contribution to the overall help that the U.S. provided for Bosnian people.” 

“People of #Kosovo & myself join the family, friends of @SenJohnMcCain, as well as entire American nation, in mourning his passing,” tweeted Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi. “One of his last foreign trips was in 2017 in #Kosovo, when I bestowed him our highest order of merit. He was one of the last true heroes of our era.” 

Albanian President Ilir Meta and Prime Minister Edi Rama said Albanians were also mourning the loss of a good friend.

“Sen. McCain was a staunch supporter of Kosovo’s freedom and independence,” he wrote on Facebook. “He was one of the main supporters of Albania joining NATO. … Albanians will be forever grateful to him.”

This story originated in VOA’s Eurasia Division. 

 
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In Turkey, a group known as the “Saturday Mothers” marked the 700th week of gathering in Istanbul to protest the forced disappearances and political murders in Turkey during the military coup-era of 1980s and the Kurdish-Turkish conflict of the 1990s. But as Dorian Jones reports, Turkish authorities broke up the vigil Saturday.
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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras saw his interior minister take up a key post in his leftist Syriza party on Monday, heralding a cabinet reshuffle to shore up waning support after painful bailouts.

In a rousing speech, Tsipras ruled out early elections, telling his party faithful that polls would be held as scheduled in the autumn of 2019, but that his government and the Syriza movement needed ‘new blood.’

The country emerged from the biggest bailout in economic history last week but jaded Greeks found little reason to celebrate after nine years of cuts and job losses.

“It will be the mother of all battles,” Tsipras declared, referring to the election next year, effectively firing the opening salvo to what appears to be a long-drawn out election campaign.

“To give all these battles victoriously we need to rally together, unity and renewal. Our country, the government and the party, need new blood and more appetite to get to work,” he said.

Greece holds parliamentary elections every four years, with the next expected by October 2019 at the latest.

Based on the latest three opinion polls conducted by Greek media, Syriza is trailing the main opposition New Democracy conservatives by between 5.3 and 11.6 percentage points.

Panos Skourletis, the interior minister nominated by Tsipras to become new Secretary of Syriza’s Central Committee, is a party stalwart with widespread support at a grassroots level. He was backed by a wide majority of central committee members and was elected for the post late on Monday.

Tsipras was elected in 2015 promising to end years of austerity for Greece, imposed by international creditors. But he was forced to reverse course by the prospect of the country being kicked out of the euro zone and pursue deeper reforms under a third international bailout program.

“From now on… we no longer have the alibi of implementing a program which is not ours,” Skourletis told the central committee, adding that he saw potential for reform but also challenges for the party in the post-bailout period.

Austerity and political turmoil followed as the economy shrank by a quarter, pushing a third of the population into poverty and forcing the migration of thousands abroad.

The bailout programmes concluded last week. Greece has received 288 billion euros in financial aid since 2010.

Tsipras said the government now had the fiscal space to alleviate some tax burden on business and individuals, but was not specific. “We are ready to proceed with brave interventions,” he said.

Government officials have previously said the government may scrap plans for further pension cuts next year.

Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, who steered the country’s exit from the third bailout, was likely to remain in his post, sources said.

Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, instrumental in brokering an accord ending years of dispute with Macedonia over its name, was also  expected to stay on board.
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The European Union does not believe Syria is safe for refugees to go back, officials in Brussels said of a Russian push to have people return to the war-torn country and the international community to spend money on rebuilding it.

The bloc’s foreign ministers will discuss the matter in Austria later this week.

EU officials expect the bloc to stick to its line that it would not offer reconstruction money for as long as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — propped back to power by Russian and Iranian militaries — does not let the opposition share power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said before talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier this month that everything needed to be done for Syria refugees to return. “But the conditions are just not there. Russia would want us to pay for it but Syria under Assad is not safe,” said one EU official.

The EU has backed Syrian opposition groups in the multi-faceted war that has raged for more than seven years, largely because global and regional powers disagree on how to end it.
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Turkey’s Erdogan says will bring safety and peace to Syria, Iraq

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan vowed on Sunday to bring peace and safety to Iraq and areas in Syria not under Turkish control and said terrorist organizations in those areas would be eliminated.

Turkey, which has backed some rebel groups in Syria, has been working with Russia, which supports Syrian President Bashar al Assad, and Iran for a political resolution to the crisis.

It has so far carried out two cross-border operations along its border with Syria and set up a dozen military observations posts in the northern Syrian region of Idlib.

The rebel-held Idlib enclave is a refuge for civilians and rebels displaced from other areas of Syria as well as for powerful jihadist forces, but has been hit by a wave of air strikes and shelling this month.

The attacks posed a possible prelude to a full-scale Syrian government offensive, which Turkey has said would be disastrous.

Speaking in the southeastern province of Mus to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of Manzikert of 1071, Erdogan vowed to bring peace and safety to Syria and Iraq.

“It is not for nothing that the only places in Syria where security and peace have been established are under Turkey’s control. God willing, we will establish the same peace in other parts of Syria too. God willing, we will bring the same peace to Iraq, where terrorist organizations are active,” he said.

Erdogan also linked regional conflicts and an ongoing currency crisis in Turkey, which he has cast as an “economic war”, to previous attempts to invade Anatolia, warning that the this would lead to the collapse of surrounding regions.

“Those who seek temporary reasons behind the troubles we have been facing recently are wrong, very wrong. The attacks we face today… are rooted in history,” he said.

“Don’t forget, Anatolia is a wall and if this wall collapses, there will no longer be a Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Balkans or Caucasus.”

Turkey’s lira has tumbled nearly 40 percent this year as investor concerns over Erdogan’s grip on monetary policy and a growing dispute with the United States put pressure on the currency.

Ankara has accused Washington of targeting Turkey over the fate of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor being tried in Turkey on terrorism charges that he denies.

“Some careless people among us think this is about Tayyip Erdogan or the AK Party. No, this is about Turkey,” Erdogan said.
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Three days after she was given a temporary release, a British-Iranian woman returned to prison in Tehran Sunday after authorities there refused to extend the furlough.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, has been jailed since early 2016 following her arrest at the Tehran airport as she tried to return to Britain with her daughter following a family visit.  Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was born in Iran, is married to a British man and has dual British and Iranian citizenship. She was given a five year sentence for “plotting to topple the Iranian regime.”

Last week she received a three day release “to reunite with her family,” according to a tweet from Iran’s ambassador to Britain, Hamid Baeidinejad.  

Family members and supporters hoped that the furlough would be extended or even made permanent, but her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said Sunday that after mixed messages from Iranian authorities as to whether Zaghari-Ratcliffe could remain free longer, she returned to Evin prison.  Ratcliffe said his wife went back to prison voluntarily to avoid having their daughter, who is living with relatives in Iran, see her “dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.”

Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, tweeted that he had spoken to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif last week in an effort to win Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s freedom “but that clearly wasn’t enough.”
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Pope Francis issued a sweeping apology Sunday for the “crimes” of the Catholic Church in Ireland, saying church officials regularly didn’t respond with compassion to the many abuses children and women suffered over the years and vowing to work for justice.

Francis was interrupted by applause as he read the apology out loud at the start of Mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.

Hundreds of kilometers (miles) away, somber protesters marched through the Irish town of Tuam and recited the names of an estimated 800 babies and young children who died at a Catholic Church-run orphanage there, most during the 1950s.

“Elizabeth Murphy, 4 months. Annie Tyne, 3 months. John Joseph Murphy, 10 months,” the protesters said in memory of the children who were buried in an unmarked mass grave whose discovery was confirmed only last year.

Francis, who is on a weekend visit to Ireland, told the hundreds of thousands of people who turned out for Mass that he met Saturday with victims of all sorts of abuses: sexual and labor, as well as children wrenched from their unwed mothers and forcibly put up for adoption.

Responding to a plea from the adoptees, the pope assured their aging biological mothers that it wasn’t a sin to go looking for the lost children they had lost. The woman had been told for decades that it was.

“May the Lord keep this state of shame and compunction and give us strength so this never happens again, and that there is justice,” he said.

Ireland has thousands of now-adult adoptees who were taken at birth from their mothers, who had been forced to live and work in laundries and other workhouses for “fallen women.”

One forced adoptee, Clodagh Malone, said Francis was “shocked” at what the group that met with the pope told him and “he listened to each and every one of us with respect and compassion.”

The survivors asked Francis to speak out Sunday to let all the mothers know that they did nothing wrong and that it wasn’t a sin — as church officials had told them — to try to find their children later in life.

They said the Argentine pope understood well their plight, given Argentina’s own history of forced adoptions of children born to purported leftists during its 1970s military dictatorship.

“That is a big step forward for a lot of elderly women, particularly in the countryside in Ireland, who have lived 30, 40, 50, 60 years in fear,” another adoptee, Paul Redmond, told The Associated Press. “That would mean a lot to them.”

Francis’ first day in Ireland was dominated by the abuse scandal and Ireland’s fraught history of atrocities committed in the name of purifying the Catholic faith. He received a lukewarm reception on the streets, but tens of thousands of people thronged Dublin’s Croke Park Stadium on Saturday night for a family rally featuring Ireland’s famous Riverdance performers and tenor Andrea Boccelli.

The abuse scandal has devastated the church’s reputation in Ireland since the 1990s and has exploded anew in the United States.

The American church’s scandal took a new twist Sunday, when two conservative Catholic news outlets, the National Catholic Register and LifeSiteNews, published a letter attributed to a former Vatican ambassador to the U.S.

The letter attributed to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano accused Vatican officials of knowing about the sexual escapades of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick since 2000, but making him a cardinal anyway. Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation as cardinal last month after a U.S. church investigation determined an accusation he molested a minor was “credible.”

In the letter, Vigano said McCarrick initially was sanctioned by the Vatican in 2009 or 2010, but that Francis rehabilitated him in 2013 despite being informed of McCarrick’s penchant to invite young seminarians into his bed.

The Vatican didn’t immediately comment on the letter.

In Tuam, meanwhile, survivors of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home They lit candles and placed hundreds of pairs of tiny shoes around a tiny white coffin at the site near a sewage area on the home’s former grounds where the babies and children were buried.

Irish government-appointed investigators reported last year that DNA analysis of selected remains confirmed the ages of the dead ranged from 35 weeks to 3 years old and were buried chiefly in the 1950s. The Tuam home closed in 1961.

An amateur Irish historian, Catherine Corless, led to the discovery of the grave after she tracked down death certificates for nearly 800 children who had died as residents of the facility, but could find a burial record for only one child.

Corless and Tuam survivors are seeking an apology from the pope, as well as a decision to exhume the children’s remains to give them a proper church burial.
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