Church officials confirmed Thursday evening that Cardinal Donald Wuerl knew of allegations against Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick since 2004, according to the Washington Post. Wuerl at the time claimed that he had no prior knowledge of these accusations against his predecessor.
McCarrick, a celebrated leader of the Catholic Church, was accused in June of sexually abusing a teenager nearly 50 years ago. He was subsequently removed after an investigation.
In an interview with the Catholic Standard at the time, Wuerl emphasized his — and the Church’s — shock about the news, implying that he was unaware of any accusations against McCarrick.
“ … in my years here in Washington and even before that, I had not heard them,” he said about rumors of sexual assault.
“I think we were all shocked and saddened when we learned this past week when Cardinal Theodore McCarrick issued a public statement that a decades-old but credible and substantiated claim of abuse of a minor had been made against him,” Wuerl said in a statement dated June 21, 2018.
New evidence says otherwise.
Church records show that Wuerl knew of sexual assault accusations against McCarrick while Wuerl was still bishop of Pittsburgh. Documents also show that Wuerl met with a representative of the Vatican in 2004 to report McCarrick’s actions.
Robert Ciolek, a former priest who found the documents and leaked his findings to the Washington Post, says that ignoring abuse in the Church “belittles the significance of the events themselves.”
The Washington archdiocese and the Pittsburgh diocese both confirmed Ciolek’s findings, acknowledging that Wuerl knew about the allegations and later reported McCarrick to the Vatican.
