The US Church faces its worst scandal since the days of Cardinal Law
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been removed from public ministry following a “credible and substantiated” accusation of fondling a 16-year-old male. This was followed by reports that the 87-year-old Archbishop Emeritus of Washington was, for many years, a chronic violator of the law of clerical celibacy – inviting young men to his beachfront property and asking them to call him “Uncle Ted” before he seduced them. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, as the Archbishop of New York (where some of the abuse is alleged to have taken place), has been charged by Pope Francis with leading the investigation. If the allegations are confirmed, it will be the worst sex scandal the American Church has faced since the days of Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, who covered up terrible crimes but was not himself accused of abuse.
The scandal is unlikely to be confined to McCarrick. These dramatic developments raise questions about senior colleagues of a prelate – some of them still in high office – whose activities were apparently an open secret. How much did they know?
According to Richard Sipe, an expert on clerical sex abuse who interviewed the cardinal’s alleged victims, McCarrick began seducing young priests and even seminarians in the 1970s and 1980s when he served as an auxiliary bishop in New York. Twelve men told Sipe that the cardinal “propositioned, harassed, or had sex with them”. The sexual harassment apparently continued while McCarrick was Archbishop of Newark.
The archdiocese has now revealed that it reached financial settlements with two adult complainants. McCarrick served in Newark from 1986 to 2000 when Pope John Paul II made him Archbishop of Washington.
Disturbingly, several reports suggest that priests and lay people flew to Rome to warn the Vatican about McCarrick’s behaviour, both before and after he was ensconced in the nation’s capital. These warnings were evidently ignored.
This latest scandal is another reminder of the blind spot that John Paul’s Vatican had for clerical abusers – particularly those who served the Church ably. Pope John Paul and his officials continued to promote McCarrick, an expert fundraiser, despite apparent knowledge of the allegations against him.
The McCarrick scandal is unlike those that have damaged the Church in recent decades, however, because the cardinal’s modus operandi does not appear to have been that of a violent rapist or child predator. His alleged methods call to mind those of film director Harvey Weinstein: badgering subordinates into having sex with him, confident that his power and prestige would shield him from scrutiny. The age of consent is 16 in the vast majority of US states. While molesting the 16-year-old in New York would definitely be illegal (the age of consent there is 17), it’s possible that McCarrick never technically committed a crime otherwise.
This certainly made his reported violations easier to conceal. Last week the journalist Rod Dreher said he received a phone call from an influential friend of McCarrick’s during his research for a story that, as it turned out, no newspaper would run.
The caller “conceded that McCarrick was guilty”, Dreher recalls, “but insisted that no laws had been broken, and therefore it wasn’t a big deal”.
The sorry truth is that McCarrick and other alleged abusers who targeted young men by similar methods may never be held legally culpable for their actions. Their victims may never find satisfaction in civil, let alone criminal, courts. At the time, the duty to protect them lay squarely on the Church’s shoulders. She was all that stood between McCarrick and the young men he reportedly targeted – and she failed spectacularly.
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