The Vatican announced that as of Monday, July 29, Monsignor John Kennedy, who currently leads the Disciplinary Section of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), formerly the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), is titular (not in charge of a diocese) bishop of Ossero, a village in Croatia.
Pope Francis has additionally “conferr(ed) to him the personal title of Archbishop.”
“He received his reward for the dirty work he has done,” Archbishop Viganò, the former papal nuncio to the United States, told LifeSiteNews, without elaboration. Dublin Archbishop Dermot Farrell said the appointment was a sign of the “personal appreciation” of Pope Francis for Kennedy, RTE reported.
The Irish Msgr. Kennedy, who worked for the CDF since 2003 and was appointed head of the disciplinary section of the CDF in 2017 by Francis, became the Secretary of the DDF in 2022, the second-highest ranking position in the department, created to promulgate and defend Catholic doctrine. Upon this 2022 promotion, Kennedy told The Tablet that “dialogue and collaboration” were priorities he shared with Francis.
Speaking of the significance of the CDF becoming a dicastery, Kennedy harkened back to Pope Paul VI’s insistence that the best way for the CDF to defend the faith was to “teach” it.
“So what Pope Francis is doing is almost going back to what Paul VI said and the spirit and the focus is on evangelisation rather than on defending. If we were creating the CDF today, we might call it a think tank or we might call it quality control,” he said.
In teaching the Catholic faith, Kennedy has echoed the ambiguity of Francis in speaking of couples living in adulterous relationships, which he has referred to as an “irregular” situation.
In a 2016 Aleteia interview, Kennedy said that a person living in an ongoing adulterous relationship “without the intention to regularize the situation” receives Holy Communion “in an unworthy way,” although the reception remains unworthy regardless of intentions for the future if the relationship is ongoing, without confession.
He also inexplicably said that such a person should continue to “attend the sacraments,” and suggested they could aspire to live in conformity with God’s will despite their grave sin of adultery.
“What can often happen is that a person can feel as if he or she does not belong any more to the Church only because he or she may not approach Holy Communion. This is not true. On the contrary, the person should be encouraged to participate, to play a role in the community, to pray, attend the sacraments, do good for others, educate his or her children in the ways of faith and strive to conform his or her life to God’s will despite the irregular nature of the situation,” Kennedy told Aleteia.
As head of the disciplinary section of the CDF, the archbishop-elect oversaw the Church’s canonical prosecution of “grave crimes” in canon law, including clerics’ sexual abuse of minors.
He was lauded by Francis soon after his appointment for being “a very good person, very efficient, and swift,” which Francis said “helps a great deal” in the requirements of that CDF role. However, Catholic media outlets have noted that little progress was made regarding both accountability for clerics and the pastoral response to victims.
Crux reported in February that even five years after Francis held a summit of bishops to address the sex abuse problem among clerics, “the Catholic Church’s in-house legal system and pastoral response to victims has proven still incapable of dealing with the problem.”
Even the Vatican’s own child protection advisory commission has admitted “tragically harmful” shortcomings in the response to child sex abuse cases.
“Recent publicly reported cases point to tragically harmful deficiencies in the norms intended to punish abusers and hold accountable those whose duty is to address wrongdoing,” the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said after its most recent assembly. “We are long overdue in fixing the flaws in procedures that leave victims wounded and in the dark both during and after cases have been decided.”
In a public radio interview on April 29, 2022, Kennedy could not give statistics on how many abusers had been removed from their office during the five years in which he headed the Disciplinary Section of the DDF.
”I don’t have the statistics at home with me at the moment,” he said, estimating that “maybe 30% of all cases end up being dismissed,” meaning that of the cases brought to the DDF, around that percentage of clerics involved have been dismissed.
The Vatican statement of excommunication of Archbishop Viganò issued by Kennedy cited Viganò’s “refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff, his rejection of communion with the members of the Church subject to him, and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council.”
Rebuffing the accusation, Viganò stated at the time that “I claim, as Successor of the Apostles, to be in full communion with the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, with the Magisterium of the Roman Pontiffs, and with the uninterrupted doctrinal, moral, and liturgical Tradition which they have faithfully preserved.”
Expanding on his position via a June 28 statement, Viganò stated that “in order to separate myself from ecclesial communion with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, I would have to have first been in communion with him, which is not possible since Bergoglio himself cannot be considered a member of the Church, due to his multiple heresies and his manifest alienness and incompatibility with the role he invalidly and illicitly holds.”