Theodore McCarrick, ex-cardinal disgraced in abuse scandal, dies at 94

Theodore E. McCarrick, the former cardinal and spiritual leader of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., who, more than a decade into retirement, was expelled from the priesthood after the church found him guilty of sexual abuse – a precipitous and historic fall for a globe-trotting Vatican emissary who was once one of the church’s most admired public figures – has died at 94.

Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, archbishop of Washington, D.C., confirmed the death in a statement but did not provide further details.

Raised by a widowed mother and extended family in Depression-era New York City, McCarrick became a “prince of the church” when he was appointed to the College of Cardinals soon after he took office as archbishop of Washington in 2001.

The highly visible position in Washington, which he held until 2006, was entrusted to a man who had decades of administrative and diplomatic experience, and who was known for his fundraising prowess and for his ease with the faithful and the powerful. He was fluent in five languages – English, French, German, Italian and Spanish – and he was a Vatican emissary to such trouble spots as East Timor and Rwanda.

As a prominent member of church panels, he supported debt relief for developing countries and criticized U.S. economic embargoes against Cuba and Iraq.

In 1998, he was one of three U.S. clergymen to travel to China at President Bill Clinton’s behest to open discussions with the communist regime about religious freedom.

McCarrick was a prolific fundraiser for causes across the ideological spectrum of the church, and he was especially beloved by many “social justice” Catholics – those who exhort the church to champion workers’ rights, environmental protection and the care of the poor.

During McCarrick’s years as archbishop in Washington, The Washington Post described him as “charming, outgoing and disarmingly impish,” and he projected a low-key and self-effacing persona. He appeared on public affairs TV shows and was widely quoted in the media.

Then, in June 2018, the Catholic faithful in Washington and in New York and New Jersey, where McCarrick had served previously, were stunned by the announcement that the Vatican had suspended him from ministry. An investigative panel of the Archdiocese of New York had concluded that accusations that he had sexually abused a teenage boy in the early 1970s were “credible and substantiated.”

McCarrick, who said he had no memory of such an incident and maintained his innocence, was among the highest-ranking American Catholic clergy members ever accused of sexual abuse.

The announcement of McCarrick’s suspension also revealed that church leaders in New Jersey, where he had been a bishop and an archbishop, knew of at least three allegations of sexual misconduct involving adults there, and that two of the allegations led to settlements.

The New York Times reported in July 2018 that McCarrick was also accused of beginning a longtime abusive relationship with an 11-year-old New Jersey boy in 1969.

Within days, he became the first cardinal ever to step down from the College of Cardinals because of sexual abuse allegations.

In accepting his resignation, Pope Francis ordered him to live a “life of prayer and penance” and to remain in seclusion “until the accusations made against him are examined in a regular canonical trial.”

In January 2019, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal and morals watchdog, found McCarrick guilty of sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians.

He became the first U.S. cardinal or bishop defrocked by the Vatican.

“He was cardinal up until a few months ago. Today, he is Mr. McCarrick,” the Rev. Davide Cito, a canon lawyer at Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, told The Post in February 2019. “This is a humiliation in that world such as one cannot imagine.”

Drawn to the priesthood

Theodore Edgar McCarrick was born in New York City on July 7, 1930. He was 3 when his father, a merchant seaman and ship’s captain, died of tuberculosis, and he was raised by his mother, who worked in a Bronx auto-parts factory, with the help of an extended family of Irish cousins, uncles and aunts.

Growing up, he would acquire the speech and accent of a New York street tough. But his yearning to become a priest was encouraged by his Catholic parish elementary school and his service as an altar boy at the Church of the Incarnation in Washington Heights.

He studied for the priesthood at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1954 and a master’s degree in history in 1958.

That same year, he was ordained a priest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. His first assignment was as an assistant chaplain at Catholic University in Washington, where he studied sociology, receiving a master’s degree in 1960 and a doctorate in 1963.

McCarrick’s climb up the ecclesiastical staircase included service as dean of students at Catholic University in Washington and as president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico in Ponce.

In 1981, Pope John Paul II established the Diocese of Metuchen, in northern New Jersey, and made McCarrick its first bishop.

In 1986, he was named archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, a job he held until coming to Washington.

“I wish I were a holier man, more prayerful, more trusting in God, wiser and courageous. But here I am with all my faults and all my needs, and we will work together,” he declared on his arrival in Washington as the new archbishop.

McCarrick’s tenure as Washington archbishop began within weeks of former Texas governor George W. Bush’s inauguration as president. Early on in his administration, Bush and his wife, Laura, were dinner guests of the new archbishop. McCarrick made it a goal to celebrate Mass every day in at least one of the archdiocese’s 140 parishes.

Like his predecessor, Cardinal James A. Hickey – archbishop of Washington for 20 years – McCarrick was a firm supporter of the teachings of the man who appointed him, Pope John Paul II.

On the question of the role of women in the Catholic Church, McCarrick said that “the gifts of women should be used in the church in every possible way” except the priesthood.

During the 2004 presidential race, he stood out for his vocal opposition to those Catholics and Republicans who insisted that Democratic nominee John F. Kerry should be denied Holy Communion in Catholic churches because of his support for legal abortion.

In a column in the archdiocesan newspaper, he wrote: “As a priest and bishop I do not favor a confrontation at the altar rail with the Sacred Body of the Lord Jesus in my hand. There are apparently those would welcome such a conflict, for good reasons, I am sure, or for political ones, but I would not.”

This view came to represent the majority opinion and practice among American bishops.

National crisis

McCarrick had been on the job as Washington archbishop for only a year when the Boston Globe exposed decades of widespread sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the Boston area and that church officials had known about it for years. McCarrick emerged as the popular public face of the church’s response to a growing national crisis.

He was the de facto spokesman for a 2002 Vatican conclave of American cardinals with Pope John Paul II on sexual abuse of children and adolescents by American priests. He was among the first leaders of the church to advocate a “zero tolerance,” “one-strike-you’re-out” policy for such abuses. Civil authorities should always be notified, he insisted.

Asked how it was that he became the spokesman for the conclave in Rome, McCarrick joked that the other cardinals, whom he usually called “fellas,” “can run faster than I do.”

McCarrick turned 75 in the summer of 2005 and, in accordance with Vatican policy, tendered his resignation to the pope.

It was not immediately accepted, but in May 2006, he was replaced by Donald Wuerl, the bishop of Pittsburgh.

He became one of a “number of senior churchmen who were more or less put out to pasture during the eight-year pontificate of Benedict XVI,” journalist David Gibson wrote in a 2014 article distributed by the Religion News Service.

After the ascension of Pope Francis in 2013, McCarrick participated extensively in papal missions, including to the Philippines to console typhoon victims, to China and Iran for talks on religious freedom and nuclear proliferation, and to the Holy Land for a papal visit in 2014.

McCarrick’s public stand on the issue of sexual abuse made it all the more unsettling when, in 2018, the allegations against him became public.

In 1971, when he was still a monsignor in the New York archdiocese, he allegedly made sexual advances toward a 16-year-old boy during preparations for Christmas services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The boy was accosted again in 1972, according to his attorney, who came forward with the details.

The alleged victim did not speak to church authorities about the alleged abuse until 2016, when the New York archdiocese established a compensation program. McCarrick said he became aware of the allegation in 2017.

In a statement, McCarrick said: “While I have absolutely no recollection of this reported abuse, and believe in my innocence, I am sorry for the pain the person who brought the charges has gone through, as well as for the scandal such charges cause our people.”

Church officials also announced the three lawsuits involving adults. The accusations dated from McCarrick’s time as bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey, in the 1980s, and as archbishop of Newark, from 1986 until he took office in Washington. The settlements were reached in 2005 and 2007, according to a Times investigative story published in 2018.

According to the Times, between 1994 and 2008, a number of reports about McCarrick’s allegedly inappropriate behavior with adult seminary students were sent to American bishops, the highest papal diplomat in Washington and Pope Benedict.

Many of these episodes of alleged sexual misconduct, the Times said, occurred at a New Jersey beach house that the Metuchen diocese bought at then-Bishop McCarrick’s request in 1984.

Later in July 2018, the Times published the story of a 60-year-old man who said he was 11 when McCarrick exposed himself to him in the first act of nearly 20 years of abuse.

The man, identified in the article as James, said McCarrick, a friend of the family, first touched his penis when he was 13. He described sexually abusive contact that allegedly continued through his teens.

In 2021, at age 91, McCarrick was criminally charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old boy in 1974 during a wedding reception in Massachusetts.

McCarrick, the country’s highest-ranking Catholic official to face criminal charges stemming from the sex abuse crisis that roiled the church, pleaded not guilty.

In that case, a District Court judge in Massachusetts ruled in 2023 that McCarrick was not competent to stand trial. A state forensic psychologist had assessed the former cardinal during an examination over the summer and testified that McCarrick had significant cognitive impairment with “deficits of his memory and ability to retain information.”

As investigations nationally identified thousands more victims and abusive priests, allegations against McCarrick continued to surface. In 2023, he faced another sexual assault charge in Wisconsin, stemming from abuse that allegedly occurred in the late 1970s. The case was suspended the next year after McCarrick was deemed unfit for trial.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

To 500,000 Catholics in the Washington area, where McCarrick was once warmly remembered as archbishop, the allegations that surfaced in 2018 were searing.

“It’s especially painful for social justice Catholics,” John Gehring, a writer who worked for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops during McCarrick’s tenure as Washington archbishop, told The Post.

“He’d be at a social justice rally. You’d see him on the Metro. I was always struck by that simplicity. … He was this global prince of the church, but he understood the local church. This underscores the cancer of clergy abuse.”