(LifeSiteNews) –– Theodore “Ted” Edgar McCarrick, once a powerful cardinal, has died at age 94, according to the National Catholic Reporter.
McCarrick, who was expelled from the College of Cardinals in 2018, was laicized in 2019. He was the most senior cleric in history to be laicized for sexual misconduct.
The future ex-cardinal was born in 1930 in New York City and ordained to the priesthood by Cardinal Francis Spellman in 1958. McCarrick was consecrated a bishop in 1977 and served as an auxiliary to the Archbishop of New York. In 1981, he was appointed the Bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey, and from 1986 to 2000 he served as the Archbishop of Newark. In 2001, John Paul II, who first met McCarrick on a 1976 trip to the U.S., both appointed him the new Archbishop of Washington and elevated him to the College of Cardinals.
Then-Cardinal McCarrick remained the Archbishop of Washington until 2006, when he resigned upon turning 75, as is customary. Benedict XVI accepted his resignation.
Having had enormous influence in both the Church and in Washington political circles, thanks in large part to his charm, his reputation for attracting vocations to the priesthood, and his genius for fundraising, McCarrick’s activities were relatively muted during the eight-year Benedict papacy. Nevertheless, in 2009, he presided over the graveside service of Senator Edward Kennedy, a notoriously pro-abortion politician. After the election of Pope Francis, McCarrick returned to prominence, traveling around the world for the Vatican, Catholic Relief Services, and occasionally at the behest of the U.S. State Department. In 2014, he accompanied the new pontiff during a trip the Holy Land.
Unbeknownst to the general public, there had been rumors among American clergy about McCarrick’s sexual conduct for decades. The stories concerned McCarrick’s behavior with seminarians and priests, but mainstream journalists did not publish them. (Rod Dreher wrote in 2018 that he had investigated them in 2002, but nobody would go on the record.) Nevertheless, Matt C. Abbott did publish online in 2005 the account of a whistleblower who accused the cardinal of having invited seminarians to sleep with him. In 2008, psychologist Richard Sipe mentioned McCarrick’s sexual advances toward, and sexual activity with, priests in an open letter Sipe wrote to Pope Benedict.
Although the first complaints about McCarrick’s sexual misconduct were made to the Church in the mid-1990s, it was not until Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York announced in 2018 that a “credible and substantiated” allegation of child sexual abuse had been made against McCarrick that his ecclesiastical career came to an end.
The announcement also triggered an avalanche of stories in both the mainstream and alternative media about McCarrick’s sexual misconduct and the initial reluctance of Church officials to believe complaints about him or put a stop to his meteoric rise.
One of the saddest stories concerned James Grein, whose grandfather and father were close friends of the charismatic cleric. The first child McCarrick ever baptised, Grein was subjected to the cleric’s spiritual, emotional, and sexual abuse from age 11 into adulthood.
One of the most explosive was the August 2018 testimony of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Papal Nuncio to the United States who accused Pope Francis of knowing about McCarrick’s sexual misconduct — and sanctions placed on him by Benedict XVI — but bringing him back into Vatican favor.
RELATED: Pope Francis covered up McCarrick abuse, former US nuncio testifies
Anecdotes McCarrick told against himself suggest — in hindsight — that the Argentinian pontiff did know of the American cardinal’s reputation. When he met Francis during the 2014 the Holy Land trip, the Pope apparently joked, “The bad ones, they never die!”
McCarrick, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2022, was found by judges in both 2023 and 2024 not competent to stand before civil courts on charges of sexual assault against minors.
