Now, the character named Satan appears in the prologue to the book of Job in the Hebrew Bible, where he is portrayed as playing the role of the Adversary in God's court. In the Christian tradition of thought over the centuries, Satan has been imagined as a protean adversary taking various forms.
For example, in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuit order, we find Satan imagined as the head of the legions of devils (i.e., evil spirits) opposed to the forces led by the warrior/king Christ in the Meditation on Two Standards (standardized numbered subsections 136-147). As part of Jorge Mario Bergoglio's Jesuit training, he twice made a 30-day retreat in silence (except for the daily conferences with the retreat director) following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.
However, if Satan can make such detrimental headway with "[c]onsecrated persons, chosen by God to guide souls to salvation," no doubt Satan can also make significant headway with "unconsecrated persons" in the church and outside the church.
Now, the Dominican priest and canon lawyer Thomas P. Doyle, an expert on the priest-sex-abuse scandal, also published an article about the summit meeting in the National Catholic Reporter (titled "Abuse summit achieved something, but not what the pope or bishops expected," dated March 19, 2019):
Among other things, Fr. Doyle says, "From that time [1985] onward, bishops on various levels of church bureaucracy have been engaged in almost nonstop rhetoric about the issue that has been a mixture of denial, blame-shifting, minimization, explanations (the most bizarre, that it's the work of the devil), apologies, expressions of regret, promises of change."
Now, if Manson is correct in claiming that the pope's closing speech was indeed truly "a new theory" about what accounts for the priest-sex-abuse crisis and cover-up, then Fr. Doyle is parenthetically criticizing Pope Francis, but without explicitly saying so.
So according to Fr. Doyle, the pope's explanation about Satan's agency in bringing about the priest-sex-abuse crisis and cover-up is "the most bizarre" explanation yet advanced to "explain" the crisis and cover-up.
Nevertheless, it will be hard for Fr. Doyle to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Satan did not bring about the priest-sex-abuse crisis and cover-up, just as it will be hard for Pope Francis to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Satan did bring them about. The most that Fr. Doyle can hope to argue is that some combination of psychological and sociological factors contributed to the priest-sex-abuse crisis and cover-up.
If Fr. Doyle or any other Catholic commentator wants to identify crucial sociological and psychological factors worth discussing further in connection with the priest-sex-abuse crisis and cover-up, I would urge him or her or them to carefully consider Martel's discussion of sociological and psychological factors in his new book In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, mentioned above.
But whatever psychological and sociological factors that Fr. Doyle might argue were most important, Pope Francis has made the crucial judgment that the priest-sex-abuse crisis and cover-up were evil a judgment that Fr. Doyle most likely will not argue against.
In my estimate, there is no going back now for Pope Francis. Now that he has advanced his theory/explanation that Satan's agency has been influential in bringing about the priest-sex-abuse crisis and cover-up, he has assured his fellow conservative Catholics that the church's conceptual convictions about its teachings and practices are not at fault but human frailty combined with Satan's influence are at fault.
Granted, Pope Francis may continue to rail against clericalism, because he likes to rail against clericalism.
For an account of what all Pope Francis means by clericalism, see the entry on "Clericalism" by Archbishop Paul-Andre Durocher of the archdiocese of Gatineau, Quebec, in the book A Pope Francis Lexicon, edited by Joshua J. McElwee and Cindy Wooden (Liturgical Press, 2018, pages 21-24).
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