BOSTON (AP) — Lawyers for former Roman Catholic Cardinal Theodore McCarrick filed a motion Monday to dismiss a case charging him with sexually assaulting a boy decades ago, saying the 92-year-old once-powerful American prelate has dementia and is not competent to stand trial.

McCarrick pleaded not guilty in September 2021 in the Massachusetts case that alleges the priest sexually abused the boy at a wedding reception at Wellesley College in June 1974. He is the only U.S. Catholic cardinal, current or former, ever to be criminally charged with child sex crimes.

His attorneys said in their motion to dismiss that McCarrick was examined by a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who concluded the former cardinal suffers from dementia, likely due to Alzheimer’s disease.

“While he has a limited understanding of the criminal proceedings against him, his progressive and irreparable cognitive deficits render…