Pope Accepts Resignation of Australian Archbishop for Covering Up Sex Abuse

ROME — For the second time in three days, Pope Francis on Monday accepted the resignation of a powerful prelate — this time, an Australian archbishop — in a sexual abuse scandal, as the pontiff tries to send the message that high officials no longer enjoy near-immunity from consequences within the church when it comes to sexual misconduct.

The archbishop, Philip Edward Wilson of Adelaide, had resisted intense pressure in Australia to resign, despite his criminal conviction for covering up for sexual abuse by a priest. Two months after being found guilty, he submitted his resignation July 20, though it was not made public until the pope accepted it Monday.

Two days earlier, on Saturday, Francis accepted the resignation from the College of Cardinals of Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington and of Newark, New Jersey — the first time in memory that a cardinal stepped down over sexual abuse allegations against him.

This year, the pope drew criticism for speaking in defense of a Chilean bishop caught up in another abuse case, and many advocates against clerical sex abuse said that Francis seemed to have a blind spot on the issue.

Taking a harder line since then, the pope has begun weeding out Chilean bishops accused of looking the other way or failing to report the behavior of a notoriously abusive priest there.

In May, Wilson, 67, became the highest-ranking Catholic cleric ever to be convicted of abuse cover-up in a criminal court, which found him guilty of failing to report to police the abuse of two altar servers by a priest in the 1970s. He was sentenced to one year of home detention.

Wilson, who is appealing the verdict, suffers from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. He relinquished his duties but did not resign immediately, spurring indignation among politicians and ordinary Australians, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.

“I welcome Philip Wilson’s resignation as Archbishop of Adelaide today which belatedly recognizes the many calls, including my own, for him to resign,” Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said in a statement Monday. “There is no more important responsibility for community and church leaders than the protection of children.”

Wilson had hoped to make a decision on maintaining his post after the appeal process, but he said that caused too much pain and distress, especially to the victims of the Rev. Jim Fletcher.

“I must end this and therefore have decided that my resignation is the only appropriate step to take in the circumstances,” he wrote in a letter to the Catholic community of the archdiocese on Monday. “I made this decision because I have become increasingly worried at the growing level of hurt that my recent conviction has caused within the community.”

He added, “My resignation was not requested.”

But it was not rejected either.

Abuse survivors and critics of the church say the pope has made an important change in recent months, taking steps to hold accountable the archbishops and cardinals who for so long seemed to enjoy impunity.

But with a global abuse scandal that now implicates so many of the church’s leaders in so many of its dioceses across the world, it is unclear how far he is willing to go. The church has not yet stripped of his rank Cardinal George Pell, an Australian and once a top Vatican official who was ordered to stand trial on charges of sexual abuse going back decades. It has instead emphasized that he claimed innocence and was waiting for justice to take its course.

But the removal from the College of Cardinals of McCarrick, who is accused of having sexually abused minors and adult seminarians over the course of decades, is especially critical, as many officials in the church had heard rumors of his misbehavior and abuse for years.

In the meantime, the Australian Bishops Conference sought to sound a positive note.

“This decision may bring some comfort to them, despite the ongoing pain they bear,” Mark Coleridge, archbishop of Canberra-Goulburn and president of the conference, said in a statement.