UNITED STATES
RenewAmerica.com (blog)
November 26, 2020
By Matt C. Abbott
To my pleasant surprise, my name and column are mentioned in the Vatican’s recently-released 449-page report on disgraced former cardinal Theodore McCarrick. See pages 234 to 244 and 280 to 283.
McCarrick, who (sadly) was one of the most powerful and politically well-connected prelates in the United States for many years, was laicized in 2019 by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith after being found “guilty of solicitation during the Sacrament of Confession and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power.”
The information I wrote about beginning in 2005 pertained to McCarrick’s coercively sharing a bed with seminarians he favored, which constituted an abuse of power. It was, I came to find out, an “open secret” among several people in the Church and in the mainstream media. Yet it wasn’t until the Archdiocese of New York in 2017 deemed as credible and substantiated an allegation made against McCarrick of the sexual abuse of a minor that the dominoes began to fall, so to speak.
It was only then that we began to see stories about McCarrick’s corruption. It was only then that the mainstream media began to turn on him
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