“We All Knew”: An Unconfirmed Remark, a Sudden Dismissal, and the Crisis of Authority Without Accountability
In late December 2025, an incident occurred in Rome that would ordinarily have prompted immediate clarification from the Holy See. Instead, it was followed by silence—made all the more striking by an abrupt personnel decision that has yet to be explained.
According to reports first circulated by InfoVaticana, Monsignor Marco Agostini, long-serving Master of Pontifical Liturgical Ceremonies, was allegedly heard on an open microphone during a Christmas gathering of cardinals and bishops resident in Rome referring to the Pope and the assembled prelates as “culattoni tutti insieme.”
In colloquial Italian, the phrase is a crude slur, roughly translatable as “all the queers together” or “a bunch of faggots together.” It is not ambiguous language, nor a theological term. It is an insult whose force lies not in accusation but in presumption: it assumes a shared reality already understood among those present.
No official Vatican transcript or authenticated recording has been released. The Holy See has issued no confirmation and no denial. On evidentiary grounds alone, the quotation must therefore be treated as unverified.
What renders the episode extraordinary, however, is what followed.
A Dismissal Without Explanation
Within days of the report’s circulation, Monsignor Agostini was removed from his post at the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff. Multiple Catholic outlets reported the removal, and the Vatican has not disputed it. Yet no official reason has been given, nor has the alleged audio been addressed publicly.
Agostini had served in senior liturgical roles for more than sixteen years under three pontificates—an unusually long tenure in a highly visible and sensitive office. Sudden removal without explanation is therefore not routine administrative reshuffling. It is a decisive act accompanied by deliberate silence.
This combination—an unconfirmed allegation followed by an unexplained sanction—is what makes the situation so revealing. Had the remark been false, one would expect a denial. Had it been true, one would expect a justification. Instead, the faithful have been offered neither.
Why the Alleged Remark Resonated
If the reported words were merely an instance of vulgar speech, disciplinary action would be intelligible and easily explained. But the language attributed to Agostini does not sound like gossip or denunciation. It sounds like the sort of unguarded remark made when one believes one is speaking among insiders.
This explains why the report resonated so quickly and why the silence that followed proved so unsettling. The phrase did not shock because it accused. It shocked because it presumed.
Whether that presumption was accurate cannot be established publicly. What can be established is that no attempt has been made to correct it.
The Post-McCarrick Lens
Catholics now hear silence differently than they once did. For decades, rumours, warnings, and complaints circulated privately regarding Theodore McCarrick. When the scandal finally broke in 2018, the most devastating admission was not what had happened, but what followed: “We all knew.”
The Vatican’s own 2020 McCarrick Report confirmed that the failure was not ignorance but governance. Information existed. Authority existed. Accountability did not.¹
It is through this lens that Catholics now interpret events such as the Agostini dismissal. The question is no longer whether the hierarchy possesses authority—it manifestly does—but to whom that authority answers.
Authority According to the Church — and Authority as Now Practised
The deeper issue exposed here is not personal misconduct, nor even the truth or falsity of a reported remark. It is an ecclesiology of authority without accountability—a model of governance in which power is exercised decisively, yet explanations are withheld; actions are taken, yet reasons are not given; reputations are managed, yet truth is not clarified.
This represents a departure from the Church’s own magisterial teaching.
At the First Vatican Council, the dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus defined papal authority as supreme and immediate—but not arbitrary. The Pope is not a sovereign who governs by personal discretion. He is the guardian of a deposit he did not create. Authority exists for the preservation of faith and discipline, not for their suspension or opaque application. Vatican I explicitly rejected any conception of papal power detached from objective truth.
Yet in contemporary practice, authority is increasingly exercised without explanation and without juridical clarity. Decisions are made; offices are emptied; sanctions are implied—but the faithful are denied the rationale. This is not Vatican I ecclesiology. It is administrative voluntarism.
Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Corporis further clarifies the point. The Church is not a secretive corporation but a visible Mystical Body, ordered, intelligible, and accountable in its operations. Bishops are not autonomous managers but organs within a body whose health depends on transparency and right order. When authority operates in silence, detached from explanation or visible justice, the body itself suffers distortion.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned against precisely this danger in Donum Veritatis, cautioning against reducing authority to managerial control or political expediency. Magisterial authority, the document insists, must be rationally explicable, ordered to truth, and capable of being received by the faithful in conscience. When authority acts in ways that cannot be explained or defended in the light of reason and doctrine, it undermines its own credibility.
What Donum Veritatis feared has now become commonplace: decisions taken behind closed doors, justified only by appeals to office, and insulated from questioning by appeals to unity or obedience.
From Agostini to Rupnik
This pattern is visible not only here. The case of Marko Rupnik is emblematic. Despite credible accusations of spiritual and sexual abuse spanning decades, Rupnik was quietly excommunicated and then just as quietly reinstated—without public explanation, without juridical transparency, and without meaningful acknowledgment of victims. Only after sustained public pressure were limited restrictions imposed, again without a coherent public account of the decision-making involved.
In both cases, authority was exercised—but truth was not served.
Why Silence Has Become the Scandal
Survivor advocacy groups such as the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) have long argued that internal Church mechanisms are incapable of holding senior clergy to account. SNAP spokesperson Peter Isely has stated publicly that where bishops and high officials are concerned, consequences are discretionary, opaque, and rare.
Against that background, the Vatican’s refusal to explain either the alleged remark or the dismissal that followed is not neutral. It actively sustains the very culture that made past catastrophes possible.
What This Episode Ultimately Reveals
This controversy is not about gossip, nor about speculation regarding private lives. It is about whether the Church has learned anything from the disasters of the past two decades.
Authority exercised without explanation invites suspicion. Discipline imposed without transparency breeds cynicism. Silence justified as prudence becomes, in retrospect, the mechanism by which credibility is lost.
Monsignor Agostini’s removal ensures that this episode cannot be dismissed as mere rumour. The refusal to explain that removal ensures that the most damaging interpretations are left standing.
The Church does not suffer today from a lack of authority. It suffers from an unwillingness to bind authority to truth, explanation, and accountability, as her own magisterium requires. Until that ecclesiological failure is addressed, Catholics will continue to hear in every silence an echo of words they know too well:
We all knew.
- Vatican Secretariat of State, Report on the Holy See’s Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related to Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (2020).
- Frédéric Martel, In the Closet of the Vatican (Bloomsbury, 2019).
- Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi (1943).
- First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus (1870).
- Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Veritatis (1990).
- Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), public statements and press releases, 2018–2025.
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