WALTHAM (MA)
BishopAccountability.org

November 10, 2020

Stripped of his clerical status on January 11, 2019, becoming the first cardinal to be laicized for sex crimes. As of November 8, 2020, McCarrick had been publicly accused of sexually abusing at least ten minors in New York and New Jersey and of sexually abusing and/or harassing at least eight seminarians and priests of the Metuchen diocese and Newark archdiocese.

Substantive allegations against McCarrick were public on the internet for more than a decade before the mainstream press reported them. In 2005, conservative Catholic blogger Matt Abbott wrote about McCarrick’s alleged abuses of seminarians and priests. In 2008, scholar Richard Sipe published an open letter to Pope Benedict, saying he knew of “at least four priests who have had sexual encounters with Cardinal McCarrick.” In 2010, in an essay entitled the Cardinal McCarrick Syndrome, Sipe published excerpts from files of a church…