They all knew. All the sons of bitches knew. And they did not care.
So, Ted McCarrick is dead, and the gristled pervert does not deserve to rest in peace. He never admitted his crimes — and there were many — much less apologized for them. He was like a figure out of Dante’s Inferno — not a grand, operatic damned figure like Farinata, but rather a grasping, cunning, rat-like creature.
At this point, we hardly need to recount the details of his life, but for the uninitiated, here (unlocked) is the New York Times obituary. Excerpts:
The accusations against Cardinal McCarrick, 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 pedophile priests for years.
Although Cardinal 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 cooperated 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, N.J., in the 1980s, when Cardinal 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 Cardinal 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 honor, 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.
Here is the meat of it:
An investigation by The New York Times in 2018 revealed that members of the church hierarchy had known for decades about accusations that Father 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 Father 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 Cardinal 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 checks totaling more than $600,000 to some 100 powerful Catholic clerics, including Vatican officials, some of them directly involved in assessing misconduct claims against him. The checks were drawn from a special charity account of the Archdiocese of Washington, where he began serving as archbishop in 2001, The Post said.
They all knew. All the sons of bitches knew. And they did not care. Uncle Ted either bought them off, or they were too interested in preserving the image of the Church to take action. And not just the hierarchy: my path crossed Uncle Ted’s in 2002, when I was a writer at National Review, and a staunch Catholic determined to help the mission to clean out the church — my church, the church I wanted to be safe for my toddler son. I learned from a parish priest of a delegation of prominent lay Catholics who had gone to Rome to warn the Vatican not to move Archbishop McCarrick of Newark to Washington, where he would become a cardinal. Why not? Because McCarrick was a serial abuser.
Continue reading at Rod Dreher’s Diary