For traditionalists, Martin’s invitation from the Vatican to speak last week in Dublin at a massive World Meeting of Families event was proof of how Francis is gradually eroding church teachings on sexuality. Before Francis landed in Dublin, a group of 400 dissidents met for two days at a hotel for what one organizer called a gathering to promote “the authentic teachings of the Catholic Church.” And in Madison, Wis., responding to the church’s sex abuse crisis, Bishop Robert Morlino wrote in a letter to Catholics in his diocese that “it is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.”<doc-sep>VATICAN CITY, VATICAN - MARCH 29: Pope Francis waves to the faithful as he leaves St. Peter's Square at the the end of Palm Sunday Mass on March 29, 2015 in Vatican City, Vatican. On Palm Sunday Christians celebrate Jesus' arrival into Jerusalem, where he was put to death. It marks the official beginning of Holy Week during which Christians observe the death of Christ before celebrations begin on Easter. (Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images) Charlene, Princess of Monaco (2-L) kisses the hand of Pope Francis, as her husband Prince Albert II of Monaco (L) looks on prior to a private audience with the pontiff at the Vatican on January 18, 2016. / AFP / FILIPPO MONTEFORTE (Photo credit should read FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/Getty Images) Pope Francis meets with Polish bishops at Wawel royal castle in Krakow, on July 27, 2016 during World Youth Days. Pope Francis heads to Poland for an international Catholic youth festival with a mission to encourage openness to migrants. / AFP / WOJTEK RADWANSKI (Photo credit should read WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP/Getty Images) A general view shows the crowd during the Easter Sunday mass on April 16, 2017 at St Peter's square in Vatican. Christians around the world are marking the Holy Week, commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, leading up to his resurrection on Easter. / AFP PHOTO / Filippo MONTEFORTE (Photo credit should read FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/Getty Images) Pope Francis marries flight attendants Carlos Ciuffardi, left, and Paola Podest, center, during a flight from Santiago, Chile, to Iquique, Chile, Thursday, Jan. 18, 2018. Pope Francis celebrated the first-ever airborne papal wedding, marrying these two flight attendants from Chile's flagship airline during the flight. The couple had been married civilly in 2010, however, they said they couldn't follow-up with a church ceremony because of the 2010 earthquake that hit Chile. (L'Osservatore Romano Vatican Media/Pool Photo via AP) On Sunday (April 15) Pope Francis comforted a child who lost his father during a visit to a poor district of Rome, saying God has a "dad's heart". During a meeting Francis answered questions from children and one of them, Emanuele, was too shy to speak at the microphone so the pontiff decided to invite him onto stage. The child started crying and hugged Francis and whispered his question into the pope's ears, saying he was afraid that his father, who was an atheist, could not go to heaven. Francis comforted Emanuele and said that it is God who decides who goes to heaven and that, since God has a 'dad's heart', he will not abandon the boy's dad, even if he was not a believer. The leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics visited the parish of St. Paul of the Cross in Rome's Corviale neighbourhood and met with children of the poor district of the Italian capital and celebrated Mass for the parish community. MALMO, SWEDEN - OCTOBER 31: Pope Francis gives a speech during the 'Together in Hope' event at Malmo Arena on October 31, 2016 in Malmo, Sweden. The Pope is on 2 days visit attending Catholic-Lutheran Commemoration in Lund and Malmo. (Photo by Michael Campanella/Getty Images) Pope Francis delivers his speech during his audience for members of the International Pilgrimage of the Ministrants at St Peter's Square on July 31, 2018 in Vatican City. (Photo by Andreas SOLARO / AFP) (Photo credit should read ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP/Getty Images) Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and Nairobi, Kenya, and the author of the book “The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness.” Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion articles on CNN. (CNN) — As long-simmering tensions in the Catholic Church again boil to the surface over allegations of child sex crimes, a prominent – and controversial – archbishop is calling for the Pope’s resignation. Is the church confronting a coup, or is it finally facing a reckoning? It’s both. Courtesy of Jill Filipovic Jill Filipovic Of course, the church needs to be held accountable for the scandal – up to its highest leader. But there is little evidence that the new calls to oust Pope Francis are being made in good faith over genuine concern for children abused over decades – or the culture of male impunity that enabled it. No, this current wave of outrage is led by the conservative clergy, via a recent 11-page later from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò – the former top Vatican diplomat in the United States, who Francis chose to replace. Viganò alleges that a “homosexual current” led to the sexual abuse scandal and that Francis covered for a cardinal he knew was a “sexual predator.” The Pope’s response: “I will not say a single word on this.” It is important to note here that Viganò and other doctrinally conservative Catholics don’t like the Pope’s more progressive doctrine: things like caring for the poor, speaking out for immigrants, and easing up on the animosity toward gays and divorced women. In fact, those same conservatives have defended and even promoted the very aspects of the Catholic Church that allowed sex abuse and other appalling treatment of children to thrive: lionizing male power, subordinating women, and stigmatizing homosexuality. Now they’re using new sex abuse allegations as ammunition against a pope they believe is too permissive. It’s a drama in which there is no one to root for. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro told NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday that the Vatican knew about the sex abuse allegations in churches across his state, though he did not say when the Vatican learned of the allegations. Whether Pope Francis was personally aware is less clear, but as the leader and figurehead of the church, the responsibility ultimately lies with him – as it did with his predecessor and the man before him, both of whom faced no consequences. It is long past due that the head of this institution answers not just for the priests who spent decades abusing thousands of children, but for the institution itself spending millions to fight accusers and cover its own tracks.<doc-sep>He said that neither Cardinal Parolin nor a host of other Vatican officials had replied, but that when he had brought up the subject with Cardinal McCarrick’s replacement in Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, “it was immediately clear to me that he was fully aware of it.” Ed McFadden, a spokesman for Cardinal Wuerl, disputed that account on Sunday. “In spite of what Archbishop Viganò’s memo indicates, Cardinal Wuerl did not receive any documentation or information during his time in Washington regarding any actions taken against Archbishop McCarrick,” Mr. McFadden said. Some survivors of clerical abuse called the allegations a distraction. “This is infighting between curia factions that are exploiting the abuse crisis and victims of clergy sexual abuse as leverage in the struggle for church power,” said Peter Isely, a survivor. “The sexual abuse crisis is not about whether a bishop is a liberal or a conservative. It is about protecting children.” The controversy over the allegations is expected to grow in coming days, especially as Francis has declined to deny it. Instead on Sunday’s flight, he blamed the media for promoting an “atmosphere of guilt” around suspected clerics and shared that until his visit he “had never heard” about Ireland’s notorious mother and baby homes, where children were ripped away from unwed mothers. He also sought to strike the same conciliatory tone that hundreds of thousands of faithful heard earlier in the day as he began a Mass at Phoenix Park in Dublin by explicitly asking forgiveness for the church’s sins and abuse. “Some members of the hierarchy didn’t own up to these painful situations,” he said at the Mass. “And kept silent.”<doc-sep>Reeling from new claims of unfettered sexual abuse at the hands of priests and cover-ups by high-ranking officials, the Catholic Church is facing one of its most serious and divisive crises of the 21st century. Last weekend, a former Vatican official, ex-papal nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò, published an incendiary open letter calling for Francis to resign for willfully turning a blind eye to ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s decades of sexual abuse and harassment against junior seminarians under his authority. (McCarrick has also been accused of abusing two minors; Viganò does not make any mention of those cases and does not imply Francis knew about them.) Viganò claims that Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had imposed sanctions against McCarrick, mandating that he carry out the remainder of his life in prayer and seclusion, only for Francis to lift the ban upon ascending to the papacy in 2013. During Francis’s papacy, McCarrick served as a trusted Vatican adviser and influential voice on both internal church appointments and global affairs. Viganò’s letter contains serious charges. Fundamentally, it alleges that Francis was knowingly negligent in dealing with known abuse by a major Catholic figure. But reading between the lines, it’s also possible to see in Viganò’s letter a wider political concern: the accusation that Pope Francis’s liberal ideology and lax attitude toward homosexuality fostered a culture of sexual abuse, propped up by a gay lobby operating at the highest echelons of the Vatican. Viganò’s open letter exists in a much wider political context, in which both Vatican officials and Catholic conservative intellectuals — two groups that have historically been protective of the church’s secrecy — are willing to use the latest round of abuse accusations as an opportunity to speak out against Pope Francis. In the aftermath of both the McCarrick case and the Pennsylvania report implicating hundreds of priests in the abuse of more than 1,000 children over several decades, archconservatives like Viganò have painted the picture of a church dominated by a shadowy progressive gay lobby, ruled by networks of blackmail and sexual favors and willing to turn a blind eye to systemic abuse. The McCarrick case in particular — which, in a departure from many other abuse cases, predominanty involved allegations of sexual harassment of adults — has been a particular lightning rod for this kind of discourse. While it’s important not to conflate the very real concerns about Pope Francis’s response to the child sex abuse crisis with mere Vatican partisanship, it’s also important to recognize that the current crisis at the top of the Catholic hierarchy also has a political dimension. As Massimo Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University and a frequent commentator on Catholic issues, told Vox last week, conservatives are using the scandal as an “opportunity to reform the Church from abuses as a counter-revolution … against the Church of Vatican II itself.” (Vatican II, which took place from 1962 to 1965, was a major church council that critics say moved the church in an undesirably “progressive” direction.) Such dissent, he says, would not have been imaginable under a more traditional pope like John Paul II or Benedict XVI. But because of Francis’s perceived liberal agenda, conservative Catholics are seizing an opportunity to weaken what they see as a pro-Francis progressive bloc within the church hierarchy. And perhaps most importantly, this politicking loses sight of the fact that thousands of people around the world were abused as children over the course of several decades by the priests in their communities, whom their parents and families trusted. Conservatives have been wary of Francis’s papacy for a while Since the beginning, Francis’s papacy has galvanized conservative ranks within the Vatican hierarchy. Francis’s perceived laxity when it comes to LGBTQ people, as well as divorced-and-remarried couples, has worried conservatives, who have often characterized him as a dictatorial reformer running roughshod over tradition in order to move the church unilaterally toward progressivism. One of those conservatives was Viganò. Back in 2016, Viganò was dismissed from his post as papal nuncio (essentially an ambassador) after having brokered a meeting, without Francis’s knowledge or consent, between the pope and Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk lionized for refusing to sign marriage certificates for same-sex couples. While Viganò’s allegations about Francis’s knowledge of McCarrick’s harassment of other adults may indeed be accurate (Francis has refused to confirm or deny his claims), his letter is nevertheless rooted in the wider language of the Vatican culture wars. He not only accuses Francis of knowing about McCarrick, but also indicts more broadly “the homosexual networks present in the church,” which, he says, “must be eradicated.” Viganò is far from the only Vatican insider to speak critically of Francis. Several of his longtime critics, such as Cardinal Raymond Burke, have raised their concerns about Francis through other open letters. For instance, a group of four senior cardinals signed the dubia, a list of objections to Francis’s 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, which opened the door to granting divorced-and-remarried couples communion. In a statement in response to Viganò’s letter, Burke wrote, “The corruption and filth which have entered into the life of the Church must be purified at their roots,” and then called for a full investigation of the allegations. Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, told the Washington Post that he believed “we are a step away from schism.” This current round of scandal is reviving discussion about gay and bisexual priests Francis has long attracted ire from conservative critics for his relatively moderate stance toward homosexuality. While he has always formally maintained the Catholic doctrinal line that homosexual behavior is a sin, some of his more off-the-cuff remarks to journalists have suggested a personal reticence to render judgment. He famously asked a journalist on a press flight “who am I to judge” gay people, and may have told a gay survivor of clerical sex abuse that God loved him the way he was. Viganò’s conflation of same-sex attraction, homosexual activity, sexual harassment of adults, and child abuse is common among some of Francis’s more conservative critics.<doc-sep>
Cardinals attend the religious mass 'Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice' at Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, Vatican City, 12 March 2013. The Catholic Church's 115 cardinal electors are taking part in a mass in St. Peter's Basilica on 12 March ahead of entering the conclave for a papal election that observers say has no clear favourite. The Pro Eligendo Romano Pontefice ('For the Election of the Roman Pontiff') mass is presided by Angelo Sodano, the elderly dean of the College of Cardinals, and is also open to non-voting cardinals - those aged more than 80. The next pope will take over a Church beset by infighting, scandal and dwindling support, particularly in the West. VanSickle: I pray for the soul of my abuser While you're in Rome, take in the night view at St. Peter's Basilica of St. Peter. It's in Vatican City, which is technically a tiny, separate country that's completely surrounded by the much larger city of Rome. VATICAN CITY, VATICAN - MARCH 13: A woman holds rosary beads while she prays and waits for smoke to emanate from the chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel which will indicate whether or not the College of Cardinals have elected a new Pope on March 13, 2013 in Vatican City, Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI's successor is being chosen by the College of Cardinals in Conclave in the Sistine Chapel. The 115 cardinal-electors, meeting in strict secrecy, will need to reach a two-thirds-plus-one vote majority to elect the 266th Pontiff. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) Cardinal Dolan: Sex abuse stories not new to me German Bishops take part in the opening mass at the German Bishops' Conference on September 25, 2018 in the cathedral in Fulda, western Germany. - Germany's Catholic Church is due on September 25, 2018 to confess and apologise for thousands of cases of sexual abuse against children, part of a global scandal heaping pressure on the Vatican. It will release the latest in a series of reports on sexual crimes and cover-ups spanning decades that has shaken the largest Christian Church, from Europe to the United States, South America and Australia. (Photo by Arne Dedert / dpa / AFP) / Germany OUT (Photo credit should read ARNE DEDERT/AFP/Getty Images) Pope Francis (L) speaks speaks with the Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl at the end of a midday prayer with US bishops at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, DC, on September 23, 2015 on the second day of his visit to the US. AFP PHOTO/NICHOLAS KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images) Pope Francis celebrates mass on Christmas eve marking the birth of Jesus Christ on December 24, 2017 at St Peter's basilica in Vatican. / AFP PHOTO / Andreas SOLARO (Photo credit should read ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP/Getty Images) (CNN) — Even before Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano called for Pope Francis to resign on Sunday, the two men had a history, and it wasn’t good. Vigano, the former Vatican ambassador to the United States, angered some church officials in 2015 by arranging a meeting at the Vatican’s embassy in Washington between the Pope and Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to sign same-sex marriage certificates. During his trip to the United States, the Pope had tried to stay above the country’s culture wars. Vigano foisted Francis right into the fray. The Vatican, which tried to distance the Pope from Davis, was displeased. Two years later, Francis quietly accepted Vigano’s resignation. On Sunday, Vigano struck back. In an 11-page “testimony” released to conservative Catholic media, Vigano accused Francis of ignoring his warnings about Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, who led the Archdiocese of Washington from 2000-2006. Under Francis’ orders, McCarrick resigned from the College of Cardinals last month after accusations that he molested an altar boy and seminarians. But Vigano said the Pope earlier had lifted restrictions on McCarrick put in place by Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned in 2015. “In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church,” Vigano wrote, “he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them.” Vigano’s accusations come as Francis and his church are trying to contain a quickly escalating sexual abuse crisis that has spread from Australia to Pennsylvania.