NEW YORK (NY)
The New York Times
July 15, 2018
By Laurie Goodstein and Sharon Otterman
As a young man studying to be a priest in the 1980s, Robert Ciolek was flattered when his brilliant, charismatic bishop in Metuchen, New Jersey, Theodore E. McCarrick, told him he was a shining star, cut out to study in Rome and rise high in the church.
McCarrick began inviting him on overnight trips, sometimes alone and sometimes with other young men training to be priests. There, the bishop would often assign Ciolek to share his room, which had only one bed. The two men would sometimes say night prayers together, before McCarrick would make a request — “come over here and rub my shoulders a little” — that extended into unwanted touching in bed.
Ciolek, who was in his early 20s at the time, said he felt unable to say no, in part because he had been sexually abused by a teacher in his Catholic high school, a trauma he had shared with the bishop.
“I trusted him, I confided in him, I admired him,” Ciolek said in an interview this month, the first time he has spoken publicly about the abuse, which lasted for several years while Ciolek was a seminarian and later a priest. “I couldn’t imagine that he would have anything other than my best interests in mind.”
McCarrick went on to climb the ranks of the Roman Catholic hierarchy — from head of the small Diocese of Metuchen to archbishop of Newark and then archbishop of Washington, where he was made a cardinal. He remained into his 80s one of the most recognized American cardinals on the global stage, a Washington power broker who participated in funeral masses for political luminaries like Edward M. Kennedy, the longtime Massachusetts senator, and Beau Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden.
Suddenly, last month, McCarrick was removed from ministry, after the Archdiocese of New York deemed credible an accusation that he had molested a 16-year-old altar boy nearly 50 years ago.
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