ROME (AP) — A Vatican investigation into former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has found that a series of bishops, cardinals and popes downplayed or dismissed reports of sexual misconduct with seminarians, and determined that Pope Francis merely continued his predecessors' handling of the predator until a former altar boy alleged abuse.
The Vatican took the extraordinary step Tuesday of publishing its two-year, 449-page internal investigation into the American prelate's rise and fall in a bid to restore credibility to the U.S. and Vatican hierarchies, which have been shattered by the McCarrick scandal.
A summary of the report from the Vatican put the lion's share of blame on a dead saint: Pope John Paul II, who appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington, D.C., in 2000, despite having commissioned an inquiry that confirmed he slept with seminarians. The summary says John Paul believed McCarrick's last-ditch, handwritten denial.
But the report also charts the alarm bells that sounded — but were ignored — nearly a decade earlier, when in 1993 a series of six anonymous letters were sent to U.S. church officials and the Vatican's ambassador to the U.S. alleging McCarrick was a "pedophile" who would sleep in the same bed with young men and boys. The ambassador destroyed the letters, and the U.S. church had a policy at the time of not taking action based on anonymous reports of abuse — a practice that was recently reversed by the Vatican for the church at large.
McCarrick, 90, was defrocked by Francis last year after a Vatican investigation confirmed decades of allegations that the globe-trotting envoy and successful church fundraiser had sexually molested adults as well as children. The Vatican had reports from authoritative figures dating back to 1999 that McCarrick's behavior was problematic, yet he continued to rise to become an influential cardinal, kingmaker and emissary of the Holy See's "soft diplomacy."
The findings accused bishops dead and alive of providing the Vatican with incomplete information about McCarrick's behavior, and of turning a blind eye to his repeated flouting of informal restrictions ordered up in 2006 after Pope Benedict XVI decided not to investigate or sanction him seriously.
Most significantly, the findings largely gave Francis a pass, saying he never lifted or modified those restrictions, never named McCarrick a "diplomatic agent" for the Holy See and never received any documentation about McCarrick before 2017. It didn't say if Francis had sought such documentation after one of his ambassadors purportedly told him in 2013 that McCarrick was a predator.
"Pope Francis had heard only that there had been allegations and rumors related to immoral conduct with adults occurring prior to McCarrick's appointment to Washington," the summary says. "Believing that the allegations had already been reviewed and rejected by Pope John Paul II, and well aware that McCarrick was active during the papacy of Benedict XVI, Pope Francis did not see the need to alter the approach that had been adopted."
Francis changed course after a former altar boy came forward in 2017 alleging that McCarrick groped him when he was a teenager during preparations for Christmas Mass in 1971 and 1972 in New York. The allegation was the first solid claim against McCarrick involving a minor and triggered the canonical trial that resulted in his defrocking.
The report contains heartbreaking new testimony from people who tried to raise the alarm about McCarrick's inappropriate behavior, including with children, starting in the mid-1980s. One woman identified only as "Mother 1" told investigators that at one point she sent a series of anonymous letters to U.S. Catholic leaders, warning them about McCarrick's behavior. She described how she once discovered McCarrick, a family friend, with his hands rubbing her two sons' thighs in the living room. "It was more than strange. It was abnormal. I almost dropped the casserole dish I was holding in my hands." Her letters went unheeded, and McCarrick continued his rise.