Hundreds of Thousands of Tickets Left Unclaimed for Papal Mass in Dublin
Peter D'Abrosca
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A Papal Mass celebrated by Pope Francis in Dublin was hugely under-attended after allegations of sexual abuse have rocked the Catholic Church yet again.
“UNDER 130,000 PEOPLE attended the Phoenix Park this afternoon for a Mass celebrated by Pope Francis, according to initial estimates,” said The Journal, an Irish news site.
There were 500,000 tickets available for the event, meaning that well over half of them went unclaimed.
“The event was expected to be one of largest to be organised in Ireland since the last papal visit in 1979, where 2.7 million people turned out to see Pope John Paul II at several locations over three days, including an estimated one million at the Phoenix Park,” according to the report.
The church has been recently plagued with allegations of sex abuse at its highest levels after Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was forced to resign from office when reports surfaced that he sexually abused seminarians, among others.
Over the weekend, an archbishop called for Pope Francis’ resignation after claiming that the Pope knew of McCarrick’s sexual deviance as early as 2013.
The apostate Catholic Church was dealt a serious blow Saturday when an archbishop alleged that Pope Francis ignored reports of sexual abuse by a recently-retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
In an 11 page affidavit, Archbishop of Ulpiana Carlo Viganò, former Nuncio to the United States, blew the whistle on Pope Francis, claiming that the Pope was aware of the misdeeds of disgraced Cardinal McCarrick at least as early as 2013.
A Nuncio is an ecclesiastical diplomat.
“Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him,” he allegedly told Pope Francis at the Vatican in 2013. “He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.”
“The Pope did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time, and he immediately changed the subject,” Viganò said. “He clearly wanted to find out if I was an ally of McCarrick or not.”
The sparse crowd at the Papal Mass in Ireland could signal declining faith in the piousness of the Catholic Church on behalf of its flock.
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