✣ ✣ Cardinal stripped of ministry over abuse claim
What happened? Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the 87-year-old former Archbishop of Washington, was removed from public ministry over the alleged abuse of a 16-year-old altar boy decades ago. Cardinal Timothy Dolan said a diocesan review board had found the allegation “credible and substantiated”. The Archdiocese of Newark and Diocese of Metuchen said that in the past three cases of sexual misconduct with adults had been alleged. Two resulted in settlements. What commentators said Rod Dreher, writing at the American Conservative, said that “everybody knew” about the allegations against Cardinal McCarrick. These were not that he would abuse minors, but that he would “go after seminarians”, inviting them to his beach house and getting into bed with them. Dreher investigated claims against McCarrick but dropped the story after none of those he was said to have assaulted wanted to go on the record. At GetReligion.org. Julia Duin wrote that after the election of Benedict XVI in 2005 “McCarrick was the darling of the American press … No one dared to go against such a powerful personality.” Rocco Palmo, writing at his blog Whispers on the Loggia, said McCarrick had been one of the US hierarchy’s “principal forces of nature” – a “slight figure in a threadbare jacket universally known as ‘Ted’ ” who raised millions for charities and “parachuted into more humanitarian emergencies than most folks knew existed”. He was a patron to several leading US churchmen, Palmo noted: Cardinal Joseph Tobin received a red hat after a “Ted talk” to Pope Francis. Ross Douthat, writing at the New York Times, said more stories were likely to come out. He urged people in the “everybody knows” orbit to “make it as easy as possible for these stories to be told … without worrying about whether the stories make either side of Catholicism’s civil war look good”. He concluded: “The first thing is the truth. And the way out of purgatory is through.” Analysis, page 12
