Theodore McCarrick

Theodore McCarrick (born July 7, 1930, Manhattan, New York, U.S.) is a former Roman Catholic archbishop and cardinal who, after being accused of sexually abusing teenage boys and young men between the 1970s and the early 21st century, was the first American prelate in history to resign (2018) from the Sacred College of Cardinals. He was later removed from the priesthood. The accusations resulted in a flurry of lawsuits against him as well as criminal charges of sexual assault, to which McCarrick pleaded not guilty. Lawsuits were also filed against several U.S. dioceses and the Holy See. In 2020 the Vatican released the so-called McCarrick Report—an unprecedented investigation of its handling of the allegations—which concluded that many high-ranking church officials who knew of the accusations, including Pope John Paul II (1978–2005), had not acted effectively.

Early life and education

McCarrick was an only child whose father, Theodore Egan McCarrick, a ship captain, died of tuberculosis when McCarrick was three. His mother, Margaret McLaughlin McCarrick, supported the family by working in an automobile parts factory. After graduating from Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx, McCarrick spent one year studying in Switzerland, where he began to feel a strong vocation for the priesthood. He also began learning several languages during his year abroad, including French, German, Italian, and Spanish. After returning to New York City, he attended Fordham University, earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1954. Four years later he received a master’s degree in theology from St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York.

Ordainment and rise in the Catholic hierarchy

McCarrick was ordained a priest in 1958 by Cardinal Francis Spellman in New York City. His first assignment was serving as assistant chaplain at the Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C., where he was eventually made dean of students and the university’s first director of development. At CUA, he earned a master’s degree (1960) in social sciences and a Ph.D. (1963) in sociology. In 1965 McCarrick was appointed president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ponce (now the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico). Later that year he was given the honorary title of monsignor by Pope Paul VI (1963–78).

In 1969 he was called back to New York to serve as associate secretary of education for the archdiocese of New York and parochial vicar of Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Manhattan. From 1971 to 1977 he served as personal secretary to Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York.

During his tenure in New York, McCarrick became close with many Catholic families, and he began to host overnight trips with their teenage children. In 1976 he was on a fishing trip in The Bahamas with several teenagers when he was asked to cut his vacation short to help serve as translator between the New York archdiocese and Cardinal Karol Wojtyła of Kraków, Poland, who was visiting the United States for the International Eucharistic Congress. (Although Wojtyła was fluent in several languages, Cardinal Cooke was unsure whether English was among them.) McCarrick and Wojtyła developed a friendship that continued after Wojtyła was elected to the papacy as John Paul II in 1978.

In 1977 McCarrick was made auxiliary bishop of New York. Four years later John Paul II appointed him founding bishop of Metuchen, a newly established diocese in New Jersey. In 1986 he was made archbishop of Newark, New Jersey. He was installed as archbishop of Washington, D.C., in January 2001 and promoted to the rank of cardinal seven weeks later.

As he rose in the ranks of the U.S. church, McCarrick held important roles in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), including serving as chair of committees on migration and international and domestic policy. He also served on the board of Catholic Relief Services and led relief programs for such countries as Haiti and Rwanda. From 1999 to 2001 he was a member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, during which time he toured China as part of a mission to promote religious freedom and human rights. In 2000 he received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights from U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton.

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In April 2005 McCarrick participated in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI (2005–13). The following year, upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75, McCarrick resigned as archbishop of Washington, though he remained active in ministry as a priest.

Clergy abuse crisis and sexual abuse allegations

In 2002 McCarrick emerged as a leading voice as the U.S. church worked to address the clergy sexual abuse crisis that was highlighted that year in The Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation. In April that year, during a meeting between John Paul II and U.S. cardinals in Rome, McCarrick was characterized by The New York Times as “trusted in the Vatican” and “relatively untainted by the sexual abuse scandal.” In May, one month before a meeting of the USCCB in Dallas to draft a policy of “zero tolerance” for clergy sexual abuse, McCarrick told USA Today, “There have to be national standards that every diocese has to accept. We all look to end this, for the sake of the victims, for the sake of the church, the sake of our people.” He also said, “If after all we’ve gone through, someone would still violate the kind of relationship we need with children, with young people, that person should be out of the ministry immediately.”

However, beginning in the 1980s, anonymous complaints were made to U.S. cardinals, the papal nuncio to the Unites States, and various Catholic institutions that raised concerns about McCarrick’s alleged inappropriate behavior with minors during his tenure in New York and New Jersey. Several seminarians also reported that they had been sexually abused or harassed by McCarrick in the 1980s and ’90s. Many of these early complaints were met with little or no response and were disregarded by those who had received them, according to a later investigation by the Vatican. The first known inquiry was conducted in 1994 by Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor of New York, though the details and extent of the inquiry are unknown.

In April 2002 McCarrick first acknowledged to the executive director of the Washington archdiocese that he had shared a bed with seminarians in the past. Later that month, just before the meeting between U.S. cardinals and Pope John Paul II in Rome, McCarrick was interviewed by journalist Connie Chung about allegations of abuse. McCarrick told Chung that “there was nothing in” the allegations against him and that he had “never had sexual relations with anybody, man, woman, or child.” However, after formal complaints against McCarrick were made by former seminarians in 2004, the dioceses of Metuchen and Trenton, New Jersey, and the archdiocese of Newark paid settlements to the alleged victims. Further complaints were voiced in 2015 and 2016 by clergy as well as advocates for survivors of clergy abuse.

In June 2018 the archdioceses of Newark, New York, and Washington and the diocese of Metuchen announced that they had conducted a review of an allegation that McCarrick had sexually abused a minor while serving in the New York archdiocese in the 1970s. Their review found the allegation “credible and substantiated,” causing the Vatican to delegate Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York to conduct an investigation and order McCarrick to suspend his priestly ministry. The following month McCarrick renounced his position in the College of Cardinals, making him the first U.S. cardinal in history to resign from the college.

Findings of the McCarrick Report and criminal charges

In late 2018 Pope Francis (2013– ) ordered a thorough investigation into McCarrick’s conduct and the Vatican’s handling of the allegations. In February 2019 he removed McCarrick from the priesthood.

In November 2020 the Vatican released a 461-page report on its knowledge of and response to the accusations against McCarrick. Informally known as the McCarrick Report, it had an explosive effect on the U.S. church, highlighting decades of ineffective response to the allegations. Among the report’s findings were that Pope John Paul II had known of the allegations but had been swayed in part by McCarrick’s denials and his own friendship with McCarrick. Additionally, three U.S. bishops representing New Jersey dioceses were faulted with supplying John Paul II’s advisers with “inaccurate and incomplete information.” The report also revealed that Pope Benedict XVI had asked for McCarrick’s resignation as archbishop of Washington in 2005 after the abuse allegations resurfaced, going back on an earlier decision he had made to extend McCarrick’s tenure. In response to the report, Francis issued the statement, “I renew my closeness to victims of any abuse and commitment of the church to eradicate this evil.”

In 2021 McCarrick was formally charged by a Massachusetts court with indecent assault and battery of a minor in incidents that allegedly occurred in the 1970s. In April 2023 he was charged with sexually assaulting an 18-year-old man during a visit to Wisconsin in 1977. However, in August 2023 the charges in the Massachusetts case, to which he pleaded not guilty, were dismissed after a court found that he was incompetent to stand trial because of dementia. The following year a Wisconsin judge suspended the charges in that case for the same reason.