Pope John Paul II knew about sexual abuse allegations against Theodore McCarrick before making him a cardinal, a Tuesday report from the Vatican stated.
The report, a result of an internal investigation, details the misdeeds of ex-Cardinal McCarrick, whose downfall in 2018 set off a chain reaction of sexual abuse allegations within the Catholic Church. It relates the church’s “knowledge and decision-making” in his life from the mid-century through 2017. More than 400 pages long, the report details repeated abuses and manipulations of power by McCarrick and his associates to keep his sexual misconduct unaddressed.
McCarrick successfully evaded scrutiny during the papacies of Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. The report concludes that both John Paul II and Benedict were aware of allegations made over the decades, but without consequence.
The report adds that John Paul II, when made aware of the allegations made against McCarrick while bishop in Newark, decided on three occasions against elevating him to positions in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. John Paul II eventually relented and moved McCarrick to D.C. after an inquiry in which several fellow bishops falsely stated there was no certainty that McCarrick had engaged in sexual misconduct, even though he “shared a bed with young men.”
McCarrick at the time assured John Paul II in a letter that if allegations were ever made against him publicly he would “would be able to refute them easily,” the report stated.
“In the seventy years of my life, I have never had sexual relations with any person, male or female, young or old, cleric or lay, nor have I ever abused another person or treated them with disrespect,” McCarrick told the pope in 2000.
McCarrick admitted, however, that it was “imprudent” for him to have shared a bed with young men in the past. According to the report, John Paul II decided that the allegations against McCarrick were “gossip” or “rumors” because, while a bishop himself in Poland, he had encountered scenarios where people had falsely accused clerics of sexual misconduct to discredit them.
McCarrick and John Paul II shared a friendly acquaintance for years beforehand, in part because both of them were polyglots with a shared sense of humor. Shortly after becoming the pope, John Paul II held an audience with McCarrick where he joked with him about a incident that had occurred years beforehand in New York, where McCarrick was recalled from a vacation by to act as the then-Cardinal Carol Wojtyla’s interpreter.
While eating breakfast in the rectory of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, the two traded deadpan jokes about how McCarrick had been denied “justice” because Wojtyla cut short his fishing trip. McCarrick later referenced the breakfast in his first audience with Pope John Paul II.
The pope chuckled and, grabbing McCarrick by the arm, playfully told him that he remembered the conversation well.
“What I want to know, McCarrick, is: Did you ever get your vacation?” he said.
Interactions like these prevented John Paul II from sensing something amiss in McCarrick’s conduct, the report said.
McCarrick retired in 2006, although he remained active in some church roles. The report states that because of his retirement and “advanced age,” neither Benedict nor Francis saw fit to investigate accusations made against him until public outcry in 2018.
Commenting on the report, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops president Jose Gomez called McCarrick’s career “another tragic chapter in the Church’s long struggle to confront the crimes of sexual abuse by clergy.” McCarrick served as the USCCB’s point man on anti-abortion advocacy and was instrumental in 2004 in recommending that the church withhold the Eucharist from Catholic politicians who supported the practice.
McCarrick was one of the most influential leaders of the church until the summer of 2018 when a letter from the conservative 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 triggered allegations and lawsuits against the Catholic Church not seen in the United States since the Boston sexual abuse scandals in the early 2000s, which McCarrick had taken the lead on addressing. The Vatican responded harshly to McCarrick and defrocked him. There are at least six open lawsuits against McCarrick himself. McCarrick has 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, a fact which the report relates. 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 report damaged Wuerl further, and a day before its release, he retired from his remaining Vatican posts.
In the lead-up to the report’s release, New York 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. Following the report’s release, many church leaders denounced McCarrick again and called for healing within the church.
Vigano, in response to the report, said that in its efforts to dispel many of his claims against McCarrick over the years, the report actually gives further proof of church officials “who for too long have been silent, made denials, and turned their gaze elsewhere” on sexual abuse issues.
“The Vatican fiction continues,” he wrote in the Catholic newspaper the Remnant.
