The archbishop now says he was aware at the time of the gala that McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, was under orders from Benedict to stop appearing in public on behalf of the church because he had sexually abused adult seminary students.

Viganò did not explain why he agreed to publicly laud a cardinal under sanctions. But LifeSiteNews — a website run by conservative Catholics — quoted the archbishop Friday as saying that he could not back out of the event.

Even beyond the gala dinner, however, a review of McCarrick’s activities during the years he was supposedly restricted under Benedict showed that he visited seminaries and ordained new priests, officiated at Masses and traveled the world representing the church.

A week ago, Viganò released an explosive letter saying Benedict had ordered McCarrick to retire to a life of prayer and penance and had banned him from celebrating Mass in public, traveling for church business, giving lectures and participating in public meetings.

But after Francis became pope, in 2013, he lifted the sanctions and made the cardinal a trusted adviser, the letter claimed. That accusation has stunned the faithful, leaving many clamoring to know whether Francis — who has vowed to rid the church of sexual abuse — had covered up for an abuser or whether Viganò, a conservative detractor of Francis’ who was removed from his U.S. post, was lying.

What remains unclear a week after these accusations surfaced is whether Benedict ever imposed sanctions on the cardinal. And if he was sanctioned but permitted to flout the restrictions so boldly and for so long, it raises questions of how tough the Vatican really is on bishops implicated in sexual abuse.

Francis has reacted to the new revelations by refusing to discuss the matter and neither confirmed nor denied the allegations in the Viganò letter. Instead, he challenged the news media to ferret out the truth.

The Viganò letter has pitted Francis against Benedict, the emeritus pope, who stepped down in 2013 — confirming the worst fears of Catholics who warned that having two popes living as neighbors in the small, intrigue-laden footprint of Vatican City would be dangerous to the church.

Both popes could clear up the confusion created by the letter. Neither one has.

The silence has left a vacuum into which speculation, gossip and ideological combat have now poured, consuming the Vatican and Francis’ pontificate and drowning out the issue of child sexual abuse, a scourge that is devouring his church from within.

Viganò has filled the vacuum with fresh allegations against Francis on sensitive topics such as the pontiff’s 2015 meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

The archbishop argued in another detailed letter published Friday in conservative Roman Catholic news outlets that he had personally briefed the pope about the meeting beforehand and that the Vatican’s efforts to characterize him as ambushing the pope with the meeting were untrue.

The truth has been difficult to discern so far. If McCarrick was, indeed, the target of sanctions by Benedict in 2009 or 2010, as Viganò claimed, then he openly disobeyed the orders for years.

There is a long and public record showing that the cardinal at the heart of the scandal did not behave like a man forced to retreat to contemplate any possible sins — and that Viganò did not treat him that way.

The cardinal was a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress in 2011. He made multiple trips to the Vatican. He participated in a Mass there when his successor as archbishop of Washington, Donald Wuerl, received the red cardinal’s hat in 2010. He joined U.S. bishops on their five-year check-in with Benedict in January 2012.

Four months later, he was back in Rome to sing happy birthday to Benedict at a celebration sponsored by the Papal Foundation, which McCarrick founded to deliver millions in donations to the Vatican each year.

He traveled to Iran in 2011 and helped win the release of American hikers accused of espionage. Friends of the cardinal who did not want to be named said in interviews that they had no indication at all that he was supposedly restricted in those years.

Only in July, after McCarrick had been accused of sexually abusing two boys years ago, did he resign from the College of Cardinals, at 88. Demoted to archbishop, he rebutted the allegations and is appealing his case to the Vatican. Through his lawyer, he declined an interview request.

One explanation given by church analysts is that he had been under sanctions, but they were not taken seriously because the accusations against him were of sexual misconduct with adults, not children. Canon lawyers said in interviews that while church law treats sexual abuse of minors as a crime, on adults the law is ambiguous.

For years, Benedict’s supporters, appalled by the direction Francis was taking the church, have sought to draw Benedict into ideological fights. He has mostly resisted, and his silence so far on the Viganò letter is in keeping with his promise to essentially disappear after his resignation.

Benedict, who promised his successor “reverence and obedience” when he retired, is now 91 and frail.

Benedict’s personal secretary and trusted lieutenant, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, has issued enigmatic comments. He told the German newspaper Die Tagespost that the reports suggesting Benedict had confirmed Viganò's letter were “fake news.”

Asked by The New York Times to clarify whether Benedict had placed sanctions on McCarrick, Gänswein responded in an email: “I have nothing to add or to subtract from what I have said.”

Francis also evaded a response as he flew from Dublin to Rome on Aug. 26, hours after the Viganò letter was published in conservative Catholic news media. In his customary news conference aboard the papal plane, the pope acknowledged that he had read the letter that morning.

“I will not say a single word about this. I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have the journalistic capacity to draw your own conclusions," he said. “When some time passes and you have drawn your conclusions, I may speak.”

Viganò refused an interview request.

Following the pope’s lead, the Vatican has gone on lockdown.

Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, whom Viganò also accused in the letter of covering up sexual misconduct by McCarrick, rushed a reporter off the phone Thursday evening.

“Look, I’m not in my office. Good evening. Good evening,” he said. And he was the most talkative.

The Times reached out to every cardinal and bishop said by Viganò to have known about the alleged sanctions on McCarrick by Benedict. More than a dozen of them declined or did not answer requests for comment.

Wuerl of Washington said in a statement that he was never informed about any sanctions on McCarrick. Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark said, “I was never aware of any restrictions.”

A visit to the Vatican Embassy in Washington yielded no information.

In the past, some of the offenders sentenced to “a life of prayer and penance” also resisted the restrictions, so McCarrick would not be the first to do so. But eventually even the most notorious, disobedient abusers sentenced to prayer and penance finally disappeared behind the walls of a convent or private retreat.

In 2005 and 2007, three archdioceses in New Jersey paid settlements to two former seminarians who said they had been molested by McCarrick years before.

In 2017, the first allegation that McCarrick had sexually molested a minor was submitted to the archdiocese of New York. Francis imposed his own sanctions on the cardinal, the Vatican has confirmed.

His friends say that the cardinal slowed down a bit, but even then did not stop. He traveled to China and to the Vatican for several church dinners. He attended the ordinations of a priest and deacons. In May of 2018, he celebrated his 60th anniversary as a priest, alongside Wuerl, his successor in Washington, with a Mass.

Then in June, the New York Archdiocese announced the results of its investigation of the allegation they had received last year: As a priest 45 years earlier, McCarrick had sexually abused an altar boy. And Francis decreed that he could no longer work or minister as a priest in public.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Laurie Goodstein and Jason Horowitz © 2018 The New York Times