Vatican commission funded by US foundation whose board included alleged clerical child abuser

Funding for the Vatican’s Commission for the Protection of Minors, set up in 2014, comes from an American foundation whose board included former cardinal Theodore McCarrick who was laicised by Pope Francis in 2019 following credible child sex abuse allegations made against him.

He is the first cardinal removed from ministry by the Catholic Church in connection with the alleged abuse of minors.

In April, the 92-year-old former cardinal, one-time Catholic archbishop of Washington, faced the latest criminal charge of sexual assault of a minor against him relating to an alleged 1977 incident in Wisconsin.

In July 2021, he was charged with three counts of indecent assault and battery of a minor in Massachusetts. He pleaded not guilty and denied the allegations. At a hearing last February, he pleaded he was no longer mentally competent to stand trial and that the charges should be dismissed. The case is ongoing.

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This week, as the crisis-beset Commission for the Protection of Minors meets in Rome, the French Catholic daily newspaper La Croix revealed that the commission’s annual budget of €500,000 is financed in large part by the GHR Foundation in the United States.

Cardinal McCarrick served on the GHR Foundation Board from 2006 to 2016. A Catholic nonprofit organisation, it also gave $1 million annually, between 2007 and 2014, to the Papal Foundation in support of the pope’s work and which then Archbishop McCarrick co-founded in 1988.

Letter

In 2018, the Minneapolis-based GHR Foundation cut ties with Cardinal McCarrick following his removal from ministry that year due to credible accusations of sexual abuse and misconduct.

This is the latest development in ongoing problems facing the commission.

Earlier this week, former president Mary McAleese, and former commission member and Dublin abuse survivor Marie Collins called on Pope Francis to set up “an independent, external review” of the commission.

That followed the resignation of Jesuit priest Fr Hans Zollner, a member of the commission since it was set up in 2014. He said it had yet to take seriously the principles of “transparency, compliance and responsibility” and that there were people in the Catholic Church who, “for personal or emotional reasons, create obstacles” in the fight against child abuse.

In a letter, both women expressed “deep concern” about this resignation from the commission “of its most experienced, globally respected and distinguished founding member” and warned that attempts being made by senior church figures to discredit Fr Zollner since his resignation “will fail”.

It is believed few former or current members of the commission, whose president is Boston-based Cardinal Sean O’Malley, would have been aware it was, for much of its existence, receiving funds from a foundation whose board included a former cardinal now facing serious child sex abuse charges.