Priest Who Alerted Church Officials to Abuse Allegations against Washington, D.c., Prelate Wants Investigation into How They Responded

By Michael Levenson
Boston Globe
July 25, 2018

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/07/25/priest-who-alerted-church-officials-abuse-allegations-against-washington-prelate-wants-investigation-into-how-they-responded/gBlC7m2CWHJZaqsVUu9fMO/story.html

A priest who wrote to Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley in 2015 about sexual abuse allegations involving Cardinal Theodore McCarrick said Wednesday there should be an investigation into who in the church hierarchy knew of the Washington prelate’s alleged abuse and why no one in power spoke out about it earlier.

“The vast majority of the bishops knew this — they gossip, too, you know, just like everybody else,” the Rev. Boniface Ramsey, pastor of St. Joseph’s Church Yorkville in New York City, said in an interview. “But there was no mechanism for handling something like this.”

Ramsey wrote to O’Malley after he saw McCarrick at the funeral of Cardinal Edward Egan of New York. Ramsey said he was angry because, decades earlier, he had tried to warn church officials that McCarrick was abusing seminarians when McCarrick was archbishop of Newark, but he felt that his complaints were brushed aside.

In his letter to O’Malley — who leads a Vatican advisory panel on clergy abuse — Ramsey raised the issue again, only to receive a reply from O’Malley’s priest secretary, the Rev. Robert Kickham, advising him that the panel handles policy, not individual cases.