ROME (ITALY)
Crux
June 6, 2019
By Inés San Martín and Christopher White
Seventeen years ago, a young foreign-born seminarian was packing his bags for the opportunity of a lifetime.
During a chance meeting at a Labor Day BBQ, the highly influential and now disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick encouraged him to transfer to Washington, D.C., where he enrolled in the Theological College (TC), the national seminary located at Catholic University of America (CUA).
Little did he know that choice would influence the rest of his life.
The experience turned sour when “Martin,” a pseudonym, (it is the policy of Crux not to identify the victims of sexual abuse who do not want to be named) says he was sexually assaulted by a transitional deacon who was studying at TC and who would be ordained a priest the following year. (That man eventually left the priesthood.)
After the alleged incident took place in the early 2000s, Martin reported it to his spiritual director, his confessor, another seminarian and even to McCarrick. Two decades later it’s never been investigated, and it’s not even clear who would be responsible for looking into it and seeing justice done.
Martin’s case, and others like it, appear to illustrate two serious gaps in the Catholic Church’s overall response to the clerical abuse crisis: A problem of overlapping jurisdictions, and what happens when the victims aren’t minors.
In terms of responding to Martin’s claim, there are at least five entities involved: The seminary, the university, the Archdiocese of Washington, the diocese where the offender was incardinated at the time, and the Vatican. Under Church law, this represents a “conflict of competence,” which can be positive, should multiple parties want to take responsibility, or negative, if none want to assume jurisdiction.
To date, Martin’s efforts to press his case have been a tale of passing the buck, with each institution, to some extent, deferring to one or more of the others.
In the words of a high-ranking Church official aware of Martin’s case: “It proves that at times, when it comes to addressing abuse, we’re still making it up as we go.”
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