ROME—The Vatican hasn’t issued a response more than a week after a former Vatican diplomat accused Pope Francis of covering up sexual misconduct, but former officials are disputing some his claims—while other churchmen have vouched for his integrity.
On Sunday, two former papal spokesmen challenged the account of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former Vatican ambassador to the U.S., about a 2015 meeting he had with Pope Francis.
Archbishop Viganò’s claim that the pope rehabilitated a favorite U.S. cardinal who the archbishop said had been punished for sexual activity with seminarians has shocked the Catholic Church, deepening divisions between the pope’s progressive supporters and conservative critics such as the archbishop.
The archbishop’s indictment, published Aug. 25, landed amid an escalating crisis over the church’s handling of sexual abuse of minors by priests in the U.S., Australia and Latin America. The accusations threaten to damage Pope Francis’s moral authority and undermine his agenda of increasing the church’s focus on social-justice issues such as immigration, poverty and the environment.
The pope has stayed silent on the archbishop’s main accusation against him: that he disregarded sanctions that his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had placed on then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington.
“The truth is meek, the truth is silent,” Pope Francis said in a homily on Monday, in a possible allusion to the controversy and his response. “With persons lacking good will, with persons who seek only scandal, who seek only division,” the proper response is “silence and prayer,” he said.
According to Archbishop Viganò, Pope Benedict ordered the American cardinal to move out of the seminary where he had been living and banned him from publicly celebrating Mass, among other restrictions. Pope Francis learned about the cardinal’s behavior and his punishment from Archbishop Viganò, but didn’t enforce the sanctions and instead made Cardinal McCarrick a powerful adviser on Vatican foreign policy and the appointment of U.S. bishops, the archbishop claims. He has called for the pope to resign.
Now-Archbishop McCarrick became the first man to resign as a cardinal in nearly a century, after a church investigation found credible a charge that he had sexually abused a teenager in the early 1970s. He has said he can’t recall the incident with the teenager. His lawyer has said he deserves due process with regard to Archbishop Viagnò’s allegations.
In the absence of any response by the Vatican, questions remain open about the extent of sanctions imposed on then-Cardinal McCarrick. Witnesses confirm he moved out of his apartment at a Washington seminary in early 2009.
But the cardinal continued to celebrate Mass in public, even at the Vatican, and appeared at events with Pope Benedict—suggesting that, if the former pope had restricted him to a life of private “prayer and penance,” it wasn’t enforced. Retired Pope Benedict hasn’t commented on the affair.
Some observers have questioned why Pope Benedict would have kept sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick secret. But doing so is common practice in the case of bishops, present and past Vatican officials say. Others have questioned why Archbishop Viganò warmly praised Cardinal McCarrick as an ambassador “very much loved from us all” at a gala dinner in 2012 if he viewed the cardinal as a pariah. The archbishop has suggested he was just being diplomatic.
Several U.S. bishops have released statements praising Archbishop Viganò as a man of honesty, while others have accused him of ill will toward the pope.
The latest questions about Archbishop Viganò’s credibility came on Sunday, when the two former Vatican spokesmen disputed his claim that Pope Francis didn’t complain to him about a separate controversy in the U.S.
In 2015, Archbishop Viganò arranged for pope to meet Kim Davis, a Kentucky clerk who had become famous after she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in defiance of a federal court order, and was briefly jailed. The meeting stoked controversy after it became public.
Archbishop Viganò recently said he was summoned to Rome during the controversy for an expected dressing-down by the pope—but was pleasantly surprised when the pope praised him for his work on the U.S. visit and didn’t mention Ms. Davis at all. The archbishop was responding to suggestions that he had deceived the pope by setting up the meeting with Ms. Davis without fully informing him about her case.
On Sunday a former papal spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, and his former assistant, the Rev. Thomas Rosica, issued a statement confirming the pope knew whom he was meeting. But, they said, Archbishop Viganò himself had told them the pope upbraided him for having “deceived him by bringing that woman” to the Vatican Embassy in Washington. The pope was displeased, they say, not by Ms. Davis’s stance on same-sex marriage but over her multiple divorces.
According to Father Rosica, Archbishop Viganò reported that the “Pope told me: ‘You never told me that she had four husbands.’ ”
Write to Francis X. Rocca at francis.rocca@wsj.com