Theodore E McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington and the highest American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church to be accused of sexually abusing minors and seminarians – a charge that stripped him of his ministry, his place in the College of Cardinals and his priesthood, reducing him to the status of a layman – has died. He was 94.
Cardinal Robert W McElroy, archbishop of Washington, confirmed the death in a statement, which provided no further details. A statement by the Vatican said he died on Thursday in Missouri, where he had been reported to be living.
The accusations against the former cardinal, who had helped shape many of his church’s policies for responding to its sexual abuse crisis, were shocking but hardly incredible when they came to light in 2018, after a church investigation concluded that he had molested a teenage altar server in 1971 and 1972 while he was Monsignor in New York City. Thousands of priests before him had faced charges of abuse, and the church had paid victims hundreds of millions in settlements.
In 2012, Cardinal Bernard F Law, the archbishop of Boston and America’s senior prelate, resigned amid revelations that he had protected paedophile priests for years.
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Although McCarrick promptly resigned his ministry “at the direction of Pope Francis”, church officials said, he contended that he was innocent, saying he had no recollection of the reported abuse. He co-operated with the church’s inquiry and did not contest its findings. “I am sorry for the pain the person who brought the charges has gone through, as well as for the scandal such charges cause our people,” he said.
Other sexual misconduct allegations against him soon emerged. Cardinal Joseph W Tobin of Newark said that during a McCarrick ministry in Metuchen, New Jersey, in the 1980s, when McCarrick was bishop of the diocese there, three adults accused him of improprieties that led to two financial settlements. And former priests said he had had sexual contact with dozens of New Jersey seminarians, who called him “Uncle Ted”.
In 2018, as the allegations against McCarrick widened, the Vatican, moving expeditiously to contain a scandal at the highest levels of the church, announced that Pope Francis had accepted his resignation from the College of Cardinals, suspended him from priestly duties and ordered him into a secluded “life of prayer and penance”, pending the outcome of a canonical trial in early 2019.
He temporarily remained a priest, with the title of archbishop, but was stripped of his highest honour, his designation as a cardinal, and church officials said he would no longer be called on to advise the pope or travel on his behalf.
Resignations from the College of Cardinals for any reason are extremely rare – the last one, by a French prelate in 1927, was over political tensions with the Holy See. McCarrick was said to be the first cardinal in history to step down because of sexual abuse allegations.
In a final ignominy, the Vatican announced in February 2019 that Francis had expelled the archbishop from the priesthood after the canonical trial had found him guilty of sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians over decades.
“The Holy Father has recognised the definitive nature of this decision made in accord with law,” the Vatican said of the sentence handed down by the church’s doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which also rejected an appeal by the defendant.
Vatican officials said it appeared to be the first time that a former cardinal in the United States had been defrocked, or returned to the laity and stripped of all priestly identity, and the first time a former cardinal had been laicised for sexual abuse. Indeed, while hundreds of priests had been laicised for sexually abusing minors, few of the church’s leaders had faced severe discipline.
In late July 2021, criminal charges were lodged against the former cardinal for the first time, accusing him of assaulting a 16-year-old boy in 1974 at a wedding reception for the boy’s brother on the grounds of Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The name of the victim, now in his 60s, was redacted in a complaint.
[ Former US cardinal Theodore McCarrick charged with abusing minorOpens in new window ]
Filed by the Wellesley police in Dedham District Court, the complaint charged McCarrick with three counts of indecent assault and battery on the boy on June 8, 1974, during a walk together on the college grounds and later in a cloakroom in the hall where the wedding reception took place. Each count carried a penalty of up to five years in prison. An arraignment was set for September that year.
To the frustration of many prosecutors, and victims and their families, McCarrick avoided punishment time and again because statutes of limitations had made cases difficult to pursue. But the Wellesley charges were allowed to proceed because of a feature of Massachusetts law: The clock on the statute of limitations stopped when McCarrick was not in the state.
The accuser told investigators that he had been assaulted by McCarrick repeatedly over many years into adulthood in New York, New Jersey and California. In addition to the accuser’s criminal charges, several lawsuits were filed in New York and New Jersey in recent years by men accusing McCarrick of sexually assaulting them when they were minors.
On April 17, 2023, as the public furore over the litany of accusations against McCarrick seemed to be fading, he was charged in a second criminal complaint with sexually assaulting a 19-year-old in 1977 at a home on Geneva Lake in southern Wisconsin, where they were both guests. Prosecutors said the victim was swimming off a dock when McCarrick and another man entered the water and fondled his genitals without his consent.
The complaint said that the victim, who was not named, also claimed that McCarrick had sexually assaulted him on numerous occasions and in other states, first exposing himself to the victim when he was 11. A lawyer for McCarrick, Barry Coburn, said he had no comment on the new charge or on the ongoing Massachusetts case. Both cases were able to proceed because McCarrick was not a resident of the state, and statutes of limitation did not expire once he left the states.
An investigation by The New York Times in 2018 revealed that members of the church hierarchy had known for decades about accusations that McCarrick had preyed on men who aspired to the priesthood, sexually harassing and touching them. In addition, a 60-year-old man, who called himself only “James” in his contacts with the Times, but who subsequently identified himself publicly as James Grein, told the newspaper and Vatican investigators that McCarrick, a close family friend, had begun to abuse him in 1969, when he was 11 years old, and that the abuse had continued for almost two decades.
Many of the questions about how McCarrick was able to avoid exposure for his crimes seemed to have been answered by a Washington Post investigation in late 2019, showing that starting in 2001, he had sent cheques totalling more than $600,000 to 100 powerful Catholic clerics, including Vatican officials, some of them directly involved in assessing misconduct claims against him. The cheques were drawn from a special charity account of the Archdiocese of Washington, where he began serving as archbishop in 2001, the Post said.
In November 2020, the Vatican released a report detailing how the disgraced former prelate had risen through the church hierarchy despite long-standing allegations of sexual misconduct. The report, based on an investigation commissioned by Pope Francis, in which he largely absolved himself, put fault chiefly on his predecessors, Pope Benedict XVI, and in particular on Pope John Paul II. It said John Paul had ignored explicit warnings about sexual abuse by McCarrick, choosing to believe his denials and “misleading and inaccurate” accounts by several American bishops. Three of the four bishops, it said, found that McCarrick had shared a bed with seminarians and young adult men, but said they were not sure there had been sexual contact.
Fluent in Spanish, French, Italian and German, McCarrick – an advocate for progressive social causes who also reinforced church dogma – served as John Paul’s emissary on human rights missions for years, travelling to war and disaster zones for Catholic Relief Services and to developing countries to assess religious freedoms.
He was often exposed to danger. He reported atrocities in Lebanon, Rwanda and Kosovo; was detained by gunmen in Bosnia; toured China for the US State Department; and assessed eastern Europe for the church after the cold war. He met Fidel Castro in Cuba and went to Vietnam seeking greater religious freedoms for its people.
After decades as a Vatican troubleshooter, he was appointed by John Paul in November 2000 to preside over the Archdiocese of Washington; he was soon named a cardinal. He was 70, five years short of normal retirement age, but his diplomatic skills and friendships with President Bill Clinton and other VIPs made him a natural choice for the hub of American and world political affairs.
Over the next five years, he became a popular spiritual leader of 560,000 Catholics in 140 parishes in the District of Columbia and five Maryland counties, including 200,000 Spanish-speaking and 100,000 African American Catholics. He was also one of the most visible Catholic churchmen in United States, appearing on public affairs shows and profiled and quoted in magazines and newspapers.
Theodore Edgar McCarrick was born in New York City on July 7, 1930, the only child of Theodore Egan McCarrick and Margaret (McLaughlin) McCarrick. His father, a ship’s captain, died of tuberculosis when the boy was 3, and his mother worked in a Bronx auto parts factory. He was an altar boy in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, where he grew up.
He went to Fordham Preparatory School, then spent a year in Switzerland studying languages. He also resolved to become a priest. He attended Fordham University and St Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1954 and a master’s in history in 1958. He was ordained by Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York in 1958.
At The Catholic University of United States in Washington, he earned a master’s in social science in 1960 and a doctorate in sociology in 1963. From 1965 to 1969, he was president of the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico. Recalled to New York, he became an education aide to Cardinal Terence Cooke for two years and his private secretary for six years.
In 1976, he met Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland, the future Pope John Paul II, who was visiting New York as part of a trip to attend the International Eucharistic Congress held that year in Philadelphia. In 1977, Pope Paul VI named him auxiliary bishop of New York, and in 1981, John Paul made him the first bishop of Metuchen, a new diocese in New Jersey, where he founded parishes and outreach programmes for Black and Hispanic Catholics.
Named archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, in 1986, he presided for 14 years over 1.3 million Catholics in four counties. He developed programmes to help HIV victims and combat drug abuse. In the 1990s, after the fall of Soviet communism, he visited Poland, Romania, Russia and war-torn republics of the former Yugoslavia.
McCarrick investigated human rights violations on two missions to Bosnia. In 1992, he saw destroyed towns and throngs of refugees, and under rocket and artillery fire he was nearly taken hostage at a border crossing. In 1994, he inspected war-crime scenes and was detained by Serbian gunmen. He also went to Rwanda, where more than 800,000 Tutsi had been slaughtered by Hutu militias. Clinton presented him with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights in 2000.
After retiring in 2006, McCarrick lived in Washington, occasionally travelling abroad as an unofficial Vatican ambassador. He spoke at a graveside service for Senator Edward M Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery in 2009.
In 2013, he passed out while celebrating Mass at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, was diagnosed with a heart problem and had a pacemaker installed.
On June 20, 2018, he was thrust back into the spotlight when the Archdiocese of New York announced that he had been removed from the ministry after an inquiry affirmed accusations that he had long ago sexually abused an altar boy at St Patrick’s Cathedral.
The allegations had been made months earlier by the victim, a married businessman in New Jersey who asked to remain anonymous, to the archdiocese’s Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program, which since its inception in 2016 had paid out $55 million to settle sexual abuse cases out of court.
Patrick Noaker, a lawyer for the man, said that in 1971, his client had been a student at Cathedral Preparatory School and Seminary in Queens, hoping to become a priest. He was selected to serve at the Christmas Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral, a prestigious honour, and had been summoned to St Patrick’s to be measured for a cassock.
In the cathedral sacristy, McCarrick, at the time a Monsignor who was Cooke’s personal secretary, began measuring him. Noaker said that the Monsignor, “under the guise of measuring his inseam, unzipped his pants, and sexually assaulted him,” adding, “The kid had just turned 16, and kind of pulled back, and McCarrick was a little surprised by that.”
“Let’s not tell anyone about this,” the Monsignor told the student, Noaker said.
Over the following year, he said, McCarrick occasionally saw the youth and praised his looks. Selected again in 1972 to be a Christmas Mass altar server, the victim was measured by another man, but McCarrick cornered him in a bathroom, Noaker said.
“He just came in, grabbed him, shoved his hand into his pants and tried to get his hand into his underwear, and the kid had to struggle and push him away,” the lawyer said. “These were significant sexual assaults.” He said the events had lasting effects on his client, whose life, and plans for the priesthood, “fell apart.”
A statute of limitations prevented prosecution in New York, but the cardinal was barred from contact with young people in the Washington Archdiocese, where he lived at a Little Sisters of the Poor retirement home.
[ Pope accepts US cardinal’s resignation following sex abuse scandalOpens in new window ]
As others came forward with accounts of sexual abuse by the cardinal against seminarians, the Vatican announced on July 28, 2018, that Pope Francis had accepted his resignation from the College of Cardinals. Later, prohibited from engaging in any public ministry and pending the outcome of canonical charges against him, he was sent to live at the Capuchin St Fidelis Friary in Victoria, Kansas. In 2021, he was reported to be living in Missouri.
On February 16th, 2019, the Vatican announced that McCarrick had been found guilty in the canonical trial of several crimes: “Solicitation in the Sacrament of Confession, and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power.” It also said McCarrick had been laicised, stripping him of all priestly identity and revoking church-sponsored resources like housing and financial benefits.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
