NEW YORK (NY)
New York Daily News
August 14, 2019
By Michael Gartland
The rot reaches all the way to the top.
That was the message James Grein delivered about the Catholic Church Wednesday outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral when he detailed the lawsuits he’s filing against the church and ex-priest Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked earlier this year.
Grein claims that not only did McCarrick sexually abuse him for years, but that he reported the abuse to Pope John Paul II during a dramatic Vatican confession. The pope, he said, did nothing.
“He blessed me. He put his hands on my head. He dismissed me,” Grein told reporters outside the cathedral in midtown.
Grein, 60, of Virginia, has accused McCarrick of sexually abusing him since he was an 11-year-old boy growing up in New Jersey. Over the course of his church career, McCarrick served as bishop of the Metuchen and archbishop of both Newark and Washington D.C. He resigned last year from the College of Cardinals and moved to a monastery in Kansas. McCarrick, 88, was officially defrocked by church leaders in February.
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