The Vatican announced Friday that it will release the results of its sexual abuse investigation of Theodore McCarrick, a disgraced former cardinal who rocked the church worldwide in 2018 when he and other church officials were accused of decades of cover-ups for misconduct.
The report, set for a Tuesday release, will chronicle how McCarrick rose to power within the church and built an institutional culture of abuse as an archbishop, first in New Jersey and then in Washington, D.C., according to Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni. The long-awaited document is expected to reflect poorly on the church.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote in a letter Thursday to New York Catholics that the report will likely be “damning” and a “black eye” for the Catholic Church. Dolan, who is the archbishop of New York City, was regarded as one of McCarrick’s conservative critics when the former cardinal was in power.
“But, better that the story come out, in all its awful detail, to both bring some measure of peace to the victim-survivors, as well as serve as a lesson on how to prevent a similar recurrence in the future,” Dolan said. “We can thank Pope Francis for keeping his promise to undertake and release this report.”
McCarrick was one of the most influential leaders of the church until summer 2018, when a letter from ecclesiastical gadfly Archbishop Carlo Vigano accused McCarrick of “gravely immoral behaviour with seminarians and priests,” which had gone unaddressed by the Vatican since the mid-20th century. Vigano called on McCarrick, as well as Pope Francis, to resign.
The accusations opened the floodgates for a series of other allegations and lawsuits against the Catholic Church not seen in the United States since the Boston sexual abuse scandals in the early 2000s. The Vatican responded harshly to McCarrick and defrocked him. McCarrick, however, denied the claims.
“I’m not as bad as they paint me,” he told Slate in 2019. “I do not believe that I did the things that they accused me of.”
McCarrick’s downfall affected many people close to him. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who in 2006 succeeded McCarrick as Archbishop of Washington, resigned in late 2018 after a New York Times investigation revealed a pattern of sexual abuse cover-ups while he was a bishop in Pennsylvania.
The scandal created an authority vacuum within the church, filled by dissenting voices such as Vigano and several lay muckraking Catholics. The most prominent of these, the popular YouTuber Taylor Marshall, propelled himself into a position on President Trump’s reelection campaign by framing American political disputes as parallel to Vigano’s outcry against church hierarchy.
Vigano, in a letter praised by Trump, compared the “deep state” allegedly undermining Trump’s presidency to the “deep church” that had allowed McCarrick to flourish.
“It is not surprising that these mercenaries are allies of the children of darkness and hate the children of light,” Vigano wrote. “Just as there is a deep state, there is also a deep church that betrays its duties and forswears its proper commitments before God.”
