WASHINGTON (DC)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
April 7, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Theodore McCarrick’s death takes the clergy sexual abuse crisis into one of its most frequent dead ends. Dead dogs don’t bite?
Back in August 2023, a court declared McCarrick unfit to face trial despite his earlier attempt at declaring himself not guilty of sexual abuse charges.
McCarrick’s death brings no solution or relief to the victims and it only perpetuates a playbook, a template, allowing factions of the Catholic Church to use victims as bargaining pieces in their internal quarrels.
In the wake of Theodore McCarrick’s death, the silence that often follows the demise of accused predators risks blurring our understanding of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
While his passing may close one painful chapter for some, it offers no true resolution for victims and does nothing to dismantle the systemic failures that allowed his abuses, and countless others, to occur.
“Dead dogs do not bite” it is not a stated policy, but for some of the stakeholders in similar cases, it has been the preferred “solution,” despite the continued undermining of trust in the Churches following this path.
And it is not only in the Catholic Church, if one goes over John Smyth’s case it is possible to see how there was an expectation that Smyth’s death back in 2018 would somehow free the Church of England from the institutional responsibility coming from his role as a key figure in the Iwerne or Titus Trust and the Iwerne or Bash camps, where young Anglican faithful would be exposed to the violence, sexual and otherwise inflicted by Smyth and others in that church.
Only the persistence of victims and the British media forced, six years after Smyth’s death, in November 2024, Justin Welby’s resignation as leader of the Church of England and a new round of reviews of the policies to prevent abuse, sexual and otherwise in that religious organization.
Real relief?
While McCarrick’s death may offer a superficial sense of closure for some, it also presents a familiar risk: the tendency to view such abuse as the isolated act of a “lone predator,” thereby obscuring the systemic failures that enabled his decades of harm.
The McCarrick case, uniquely documented by an institutional report, ironically highlights this very point. The report’s findings regarding the warnings ignored and the mechanisms that allowed McCarrick’s ascent reveal that his actions were not simply individual depravity.
What McCarrick was the byproduct of an institutional setting allowing for the abuse he perpetrated, whether through negligence or willful blindness, by the very structure of the Church. This pattern of institutional enablement, far from being an anomaly, echoes in other clergy abuse scandals, reinforcing the need to move beyond the simplistic “lone predator” narrative to confront the deeper, systemic issues at play.
As regrettable as McCarrick’s death is, as it makes it harder for victims to achieve a measure of justice, it is the only case for which the Catholic Church offers an institutional explanation of a cleric’s repeated abuse on seminarians and other young male considering the priesthood.
Although the report proves that the victims were right when calling out their predator, and that is relevant, the report as such does not facilitate access to justice, more so since a court declared the former archbishop of Washington, D.C. unfit to face a trial back in August 2023. Also, because the reports puts the lion’s share of guilt in John Paul II, who had been dead for almost 15 years when the report was first issued.
Karol and Theodore
The report provides some details as to how, while still an archbishop in his native Poland, Karol Wojtyla came to know, back in the 1970s, a relatively young, multilingual priest in the Archdiocese of New York:
- In 1976, McCarrick was on a fishing trip in the Bahamas with teenagers from some of the Catholic families when he received a telegram from Cardinal Cooke instructing him to return immediately to New York because “we are hosting a Polish cardinal and we don’t know what languages he speaks.” The visit was by Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow and future Pope, accompanied by his particular secretary Stanisław Dziwisz. Cardinal Wojtyla, who was already one of the best-known figures in the Catholic Church, was traveling throughout the United States as part of a trip to attend the International Eucharistic Congress, which was held in Philadelphia during the year of the United States Bicentennial. Because McCarrick spoke several languages, and because Cardinal Cooke did not know how well Cardinal Wojtyla spoke English, McCarrick was called back from his vacation to be at the Polish Cardinal’s service during his stay in New York (pp.17-18).
The key to understand how John Paul II furthered Theodore McCarrick’s clerical career and how it is almost impossible to understand McCarrick’s abuse as the work of a “lone predator” comes from pages 169 through 184 of the report. The section, titled “McCarrick’s letter to Bishop Dziwisz and Pope John Paul II’s decision to transfer McCarrick to Washington (August to November 2000).”
The so-called section XVII of the report details how Rome promoted McCarrick from Newark to Washington D.C. in 2000. By then, McCarrick had been able to weave a broad network of contacts with politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties.
It is impossible for me to show the pictures of McCarrick attending a Ronald Reagan’s rally back in 1988, seated right next to the then President, as the relatively young archbishop of Newark, as those pictures are only available for subscribers of newswires I do not have access to, but you can find it as photo 18 of a 19-picture set available here.
Later, in 1993, McCarrick attended a visit of the leaders of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, to the White House during Bill Clinton’s first term in office, as depicted in the contact sheet after this paragraph, taken from the Digital Clinton Library.
So, when Washington, DC was open John Paul II wanted to have a crafty political operative at that see, and his choice was McCarrick. Usually, filling such a significant see, involves consultations with the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, U.S. Cardinals and bishops and priests, and potentially lay leaders.
A key piece to understand the report’s rationale is one 1999 letter from Cardinal John O’Connor, then at the Archdiocese of New York to the Apostolic Nuncio, Colombian archbishop Gabriel Montalvo Higuera.
O’Connor explicitly advised against McCarrick’s promotion to Washington. The content of O’Connor’s warning, citing anonymous allegations of abuse of a minor and persistent rumors of inappropriate behavior with adults (seminarians and priests) including the “sharing of beds.”
The report emphasizes that Pope John Paul II’s and his close aide, Stanislaw Dziwisz’s were aware of this information, including O’Connor’s strong recommendation against the transfer.
Scandal over scandal
This was happening at a time when allegations against Marcial Maciel were the talk of the town in Mexico City and at a time when the scandal at the Archdiocese of Boston was about to explode. Moreover, Jason Berry had been publishing his series on abuse at dioceses of the state of Louisiana since 1985, so the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church was already in its second decade and going strong.
It is hard to believe that Pope John Paul II was not aware of potential issues surrounding McCarrick’s suitability for the position at the U.S. capital city. He wanted him there probably out of personal affection, but also because McCarrick had been playing a key role as part of U.S. committees sent to China, Kosovo, and the Middle East region. He was effective at fund-raising, and had a way to deal with politicians, Republican and Democrat, and at the national and local levels.
Furthermore, the report describes how McCarrick had first-hand knowledge of O’Connor’s warning. He plays down his own interest in the promotion that would come with the red zucchetto of the Cardinalate, but it is clear he wants to influence the Pope’s decision making.
The report indicates that McCarrick was not in the so-called terna, a limited set of three (hence the Latin name) or four candidates proposed to the position, as nuncio Montalvo Higuera was already aware of the extent of the allegations.
Ultimaterly, after McCarrick’s letter to Bishop Dziwisz, dated August 6, 2000, Pope John Paul II’s reversed his initial decision and promoted McCarrick to Washington, D.C., as replacement for James Aloysius Hickey.
McCarrick’s letter vehemently denied any kind of abuse and went as far as to deny any allegation of ever engaging in sexual relations with anyone, “whether young or old, cleric or lay.” He portrayed the accusations as rumors intended to undermine his reputation and ministry and, more importantly, he construed them as aiming to destroy the Church’s prestige, its reputation, as Maciel and many other predators did, knowing that, during his years in Poland, Wojtyla confronted accusations from the soviet-leaning regime there against Roman Catholic priests and bishops.
In page 173, the report includes a rather long footnote (no. 580) that goes into the details of John Paul II’s understanding of accusations of clergy sexual abuse as part of campaigns against clerics and, ultimately, the Church. The report is available here at Scribd, and here at the Vatican’s website.
A paragraph of that note states: “Pope John Paul II “feared that accusations against bishops were the best way to attack the credibility of the Church” and recalling that the Pope would say, “‘Attacking the bishop attacks the flock.’” Cardinal Harvey noted that McCarrick had a long and apparently positive track record by the time of the allegations, and that “the persons evaluating this were highly conditioned by the type of behavior that they experienced under a communist regime.”
Birds of a feather, fly together
As it happened with Maciel and many other predators who claimed to be the victims of ever-growing anti-Catholic conspiracies, John Paul II accepted McCarrick’s denial and, by late November 2000, transferred him from Newark to Washington, D.C.
As the report’s conclusion emphasizes, Rome and more precisely John Paul II saw in McCarrick what he wanted to see, and using the full powers of the pontificate, bypassed all warnings to promote a crafty political and diplomatic operative, despite the fact that, in doing so, he was failing to adequately assess the seriousness and persistence of the concerns.
The report describes the final steps leading to Pope John Paul II’s regarding McCarrick’s appointment as head of the archdiocese of Washington D.C. and the subsequent elevation of McCarrick to the Cardinalate in February 2001, framing it as a customary progression following the appointment to a major archdiocese, without any indication of new negative information reaching Pope John Paul II in that interim.
The similarities with the decision-making process followed with Marcial Maciel at the Legion of Christ should not come as a surprise. Neither should be the support other predators as Fernando Karadima at the parish of the Sacred Heart of Santiago de Chile, and Carlos Miguel Buela at the Institute of the Incarnate Word received from Angelo Sodano, who was more than willing to facilitate John Paul II’s faulty reasoning in McCarrick’s and Maciel’s cases as they allowed him to do the same with his own protected Chilean and Argentine predators.
It is noticeable in that respect that in the PDF files one is able to find about McCarrick at the Clinton Digital Libraries, there is a profile of McCarrick himself, from the early days of the Internet and from his days as head of the Archdiocese of Newark (see p. 3 of the PDF in the box below).
As Marcial Maciel used to do with the vocations at the Legion of Christ with the ceremonies of massive ordinations whether at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City or, later, at Saint Peter’s in Rome, McCarrick claimed he had “ordained more priests in the last 13 years, than any other bishop in the United States”.
That was also one of the excuses used by the bosses at the Archdiocese of Santiago de Chile to dismiss the many accusations against Fernando Karadima, for many years the pastor of the Sacred Heart parish and head of the now defunct Priestly Pious Union, a hotbed of priestly vocations, regardless of how those vocations happened.
It was also the excuse used by Carlos Miguel Buela to justify abuse, sexual and otherwise, at both the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word and the ever-conflictive seminary of the diocese of San Rafael, Argentina.
Up for debate
Despite all its limitations McCarrick’s is the only case for which there is an official account from the Roman Catholic Church of how abuse is an institutional matter, and not the work of a lone predator, able to fool the structure of the oldest institution of the Western world, as the Catholic bishops depict themselves when they want to remember the world how relevant they and their organization are.
It is not clear why we have an institutional account of his case, as compared to the many other cases where silence has been the norm.
My understanding of the case is that given the accumulative effects of the scandals at the time of its publication (November 2020), a few months after the publication of the Grand Jury investigation on clergy sexual abuse in most of the Catholic dioceses of Pennsylvania (2018), and similar reports issued over the last few years in Illinois (2023), on top of the lookback windows to report cases in the states of California and New York, there was a real need to protect the reigning Pope and ultimately the Church at large from the potential implications.
More so as the U.S. Catholic far-right has been using, up until the latest development, this case to render McCarrick as somehow aligned with Pope Francis’s agenda on social issues.
The similarities are there, but he was a bit older than the Argentine Pope. Both became Cardinals the same day, during the January 21st, 2001 Consistory. Their careers are similar but beyond their interactions in Rome and in some continental meetings during the so-called Synod of America (America understood as the continent, the so-called “Western Hemisphere,” and not the country), there is little or no record of major coincidences.
McCarrick retired in 2006 from the archdiocese of Washington, D.C., and he was unable to participate in the 2013 Conclave, as he was already above 80 when Benedict XVI resigned his position as Pope. In that respect, the many conspiracy theories having McCarrick as the architect of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s election as Pope Francis are good for the click-and-bait business of the U.S. Catholic far-right, permanently drunk in conspiracy theories of all kinds, but there is little evidence about that.
Actually, what is known about Bergoglio’s relationship with the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word, how he and all but one of the bishops of the Argentine Conference of Catholic Bishops requested the suppression of Carlos Miguel Buela’s order, puts Bergoglio at odds with McCarrick’s support for Buela.
Pages 200-1 of the report tell the story of how McCarrick was more than willing to support Buela’s order, as much as to travel to Argentina to ordain members of that order.
The only Argentine bishop supporting Buela’s order was the former archbishop of La Plata, Héctor Rubén Aguer. Previous installments of this series have gone over some of the details of that case, as the story linked below proves.
The McCarrick Report sheds significant light on Pope John Paul II’s knowledge and decision-making process concerning Theodore McCarrick’s career advancements, particularly his appointments as Archbishop of Washington D.C. and Cardinal.
The report’s warnings
The report indicates that Pope John Paul II was at least aware of information and warnings regarding McCarrick’s inappropriate behavior with adults, specifically seminarians and priests. However, in the Polish Pope’s ultimate decision McCarrick’s denials played a role as did, a broader context of suspicion towards accusations against clergy, behind John Paul II’s attitude, similar in all respects, towards accusations against Marcial Maciel.
Pope John Paul II appointed McCarrick as Bishop of Metuchen in 1981 and Archbishop of Newark in 1986. The report suggests these appointments were based on McCarrick’s perceived background, skills, and achievements at the time. Rome and senior clerics in the United States used to perceive him as a capable. He was able to win the internal elections at the conference of bishops to take leadership positions. How negative were the actual background reports on him from the 1970s in New York is up for debate too, but they seem to excuse him from negative information regarding his moral conduct.
However, by the mid-1990s, concerns began to surface regarding McCarrick’s behavior towards seminarians and priests in the Newark diocese. Cardinal John O’Connor of New York conducted an informal assessment before Pope John Paul II’s visit to Newark in 1995. While O’Connor did relay some of these concerns in a 1999 letter to the Apostolic Nuncio, which was subsequently shared with Pope John Paul II, he ultimately concluded there was no “impediment” to the papal visit.
The decision to appoint McCarrick as head of the archdiocese of Washington D.C. in November 2000 is the central focus of the report’s analysis of Pope John Paul II’s involvement. The report reveals that Pope John Paul II initially decided against this appointment due to the information he had received regarding McCarrick’s conduct with adults. However, he ultimately reversed this decision.
Several key factors contributed to this change: Cardinal O’Connor sent a letter in October 1999 explicitly against McCarrick’s promotion to Washington, citing anonymous allegations of abuse of a minor and rumors of inappropriate behavior with adults, including sharing beds with seminarians. Pope John Paul II knew this letter and McCarrick was able to know that the Pope got O’Connor’s letter.
Pope John Paul II commissioned a secret inquiry into the allegations against McCarrick, tasking three U.S. bishops with providing information. The report concludes that the information provided by these bishops was incomplete and, in some instances, inaccurate, downplaying the seriousness of the concerns, but there were no consequences for those bishops involved or for the institution at large.
Institutional failures
A crucial turning point was a handwritten letter from McCarrick to then-Bishop and longtime personal secretary of John Paul II, Stanisław Dziwisz, dated August 6, 2000. In this letter, McCarrick vehemently denied all allegations of sexual relations with anyone, young or old, cleric or lay.
In this sense the McCarrick Report reveals that Pope John Paul II was aware of concerns and allegations regarding McCarrick’s inappropriate behavior with adults before appointing him Archbishop of Washington. However, he proceeded with the appointment.
The report underscores a failure in the vetting process and a reliance on assurances from the accused, highlighting a significant lapse in judgment at the highest levels of the Church, unwilling to believe the victims and more concerned about perpetuating the idea of “Church as martyr.”
In doing so, John Paul II’s decisions allowed McCarrick to keep ascending the Church’s structures of power, where he would continue to perpetrate harm, while perpetuating the many cycles of shared complicity, as it is clear that someone deep in the John Paul II curia, someone with access to the most reserved communications sent to the Pope warned McCarrick of O’Connor’s letter.
The potential for far-reaching probes, leading all the way to Rome, is still there. If they have not happened in the United States or some other country, using the framework to go after criminal organizations, is most likely the consequence of the potential political fallout of such large-scale probes.
Main problem in that respect is that the authorities would have to probe themselves. As thorough as the McCarrick Report is it lacks any meaningful explanation of why it was 30 or 40 years later, after many other cases had hit the headlines in U.S. national and local news outlets, that it was possible for the victims to come forward.
What prevented them for many years from telling their story? What formal or informal mechanisms were in place to silence them or, at least, to convince them that it was not worth to go after a key figure of the Catholic Church in the United States? Same as they existed in Mexico to protect Maciel? As those in place in Chile to protect Karadima?
What was the overall attitude of the departments of Police, the States Attorneys’ offices, and other civil authorities in the states of New York, and New Jersey, is a matter open for debate too.
Call for witnesses
One only needs to see at what is happening these days at the Catholic school of Our Lady of Bétharram, at Pau, France, to acknowledge the potential, multinational, perhaps even global risks for the Catholic Church of a probe there and at other sites of large abuse, sexual and otherwise.
The possibility is already there. As previous installments of this series have proved, the Betharramites, the order behind the school at Pau, is the owner of several schools in South America and elsewhere in the world.
Back on April 2nd, the survivors of clergy sexual abuse there made a formal international call for witnesses.
Their statement acknowledge how “following damning revelations of physical and sexual abuse within the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school in France. With 152 complaints filed and an ongoing judicial investigation, we suspect that these abuses were not confined to France but may have extended to other countries where the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Bétharram operates.”
For them, their case “exposes decades of violence committed by members of the congregation and supervisors within an educational institution meant to protect children. The incidents, spanning from the 1950s to the 2010s, including physical assaults, sexual abuse, and institutionalized mistreatment.”
They remind potential victims living in other countries, that “a former supervisor at the school has already been indicted. For the first time, a case of this magnitude implicates the State, a religious congregation, the Church, and the victims”.
They also acknowledge the global nature of the order behind Bétharram: “as a missionary society from its inception, the Bétharram congregation has been or is currently present in multiple countries, including Argentina, Brazil, the Central African Republic, France, Great Britain, India, Israel, Algeria, Uruguay, Italy, Côte d’Ivoire, Jordan, Palestine, Spain, Thailand, Paraguay, Morocco, Vietnam, among others.”
They invite survivors and their relatives from Bétharram owned schools “to come forward. Your testimony, even regarding past events, is crucial to revealing the full extent of this scandal and achieving justice. Suffering has no statute of limitations. It is time to break the silence.
“We guarantee a compassionate and confidential listening space for anyone wishing to share their experience.
“You can contact us via the dedicated email: victimesdebetharram@gmail.com.”
They remind that “foreign victims of French priests may access recognition and financial reparation mechanisms. The Bétharram Collective is committed to supporting victims, including legal assistance.”
Survivors from Spanish-speaking countries can additionally get in touch with the Argentine Network of Survivors of Clergy Abuse. They are available at their Facebook group here. The names of some of the schools Bétharram owns in Argentina appear in the image after his paragraph.
McCarrick’s death, like those of other notorious predators, serves as reminder that individual accountability, however belated, is insufficient. The enduring lesson of his case, amplified by the very report intended to address it, lies in the exposure of institutional failures at all levels.