Latest news with #McCarrick
Daily Mail
23-04-2025
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Vatican sex abuse whistleblower blasts American cardinal who will lead next pope's election: 'Everyone knows, but no one does anything'
As the red ribbons were tied around the papal bedroom door, the knot solemnly sealed with wax, actor John Lithgow's character in the Oscar-nominated movie Conclave looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. For Lithgow's Cardinal Joseph Tremblay was camerlengo – the cardinal who assumes leadership of the Vatican in the period between a pope's death and the election of a successor. But that, of course, was make-believe. Today's real-life camerlengo is former archbishop of Dallas, now cardinal, Kevin Farrell, who seemed equally somber on Monday morning, as he announced the death of Pope Francis. Farrell, a 77-year-old Irish American who led the Catholic Church in the north of Texas until 2016, is now tasked with the job of steering the rudderless Holy See through perilous waters. But, as portrayed by Lithgow and Conclave co-star Ralph Fiennes, who played the dean of cardinals, the selection of a new leader of the Catholic Church can be an incredibly fraught moment – one demanding a steady hand and a strong moral compass. So, while some of those who knew Farrell in Texas heap praise on him, others are questioning whether the affable Dubliner is up to the epic task. Exclusive interviews with Daily Mail, a whistleblowing priest inside the Catholic Church and one of America's largest advocates for victims of sexual abuse allege that Farrell's track record of spotting wolves among his flock puts his judgment in question. From 2000 to 2006, Farrell served as the vicar general (or deputy) to one of most infamous pedophile priests in America - Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington DC. McCarrick, who died in disgrace earlier this month aged 94, had since the 1960s been abusing children. A former altar boy told how McCarrick fondled him before Christmas Mass at New York's St Patrick's Cathedral in 1971 and 1972. In 2018, the church found his allegations 'credible and substantiated'. Another man, whose family was close to McCarrick, was sexually abused by the priest when he was a young boy. When he was 16, McCarrick groped him as they went for a walk during his brother's wedding reception at Wellesley College in June 1974, and then sexually assaulted him in a 'coat room-type closet' after they returned to the reception. Before leaving the room, McCarrick told him to 'say three Our Fathers and a Hail Mary or it was one Our Father and three Hail Marys, so God can redeem you of your sins', according to court documents filed in 2021. By the late 1980s, McCarrick was Archbishop of Newark, and was given the use of a beach house in New Jersey, where he forced young trainee priests to strip in front of him and share his bed. His actions were an open secret. But it wasn't until 2018 that McCarrick (who resigned as bishop in 2006) was defrocked when the Archdiocese of New York found the 50-year-old allegations that he had molested a 16-year-old altar boy to be credible. In a statement issued at the time, 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.' For his part, Farrell, who for six years lived in the same Dupont Circle priest's residence as McCarrick, has insisted he knew nothing of the claims. 'Never once did I even suspect,' he said in 2018, at the height of the scandal. 'Now, people can say ''Well you must be a right fool that you didn't notice.' I must be a right fool, but I don't think I am. And that's why I feel angry.' 'I was shocked, overwhelmed; I never heard any of this before in the six years I was there with him,' Farrell told the Catholic News Service that year. 'I worked in the chancery in Washington and never, no indication, none whatsoever… Nobody ever talked to me about this.' While there were no complaints about McCarrick when he was in DC, in 2004, the New Jersey diocese paid out over $150,000 in damages to accusers. Father Boniface Ramsey, who spent decades warning church insiders in writing about McCarrick, told the Daily Mail that it was 'impossible' that Farrell had not heard the allegations against McCarrick, and called Farrell's denial 'laughable'. 'Unless he was living in a cave, he heard the stories,' alleged Father Ramsey, who retired from his Manhattan church last year, aged 79. 'In the early 1990s, I called my friend, the Archbishop of Louisville, to discuss a church meeting, where we discovered McCarrick had been picking up young male flight attendants and recruiting them to join the seminary. And Archbishop Kelly told me "we all know".' 'Everyone knows, but no one does anything,' said Ramsey, adding that Farrell had a religious responsibility to either ask McCarrick whether there was any truth to the rumors, or speak to the pope's representative in DC, the papal nuncio. Indeed, Ramsey's verdict on Farrell is damning - that Farrell 'turned a blind eye' on McCarrick's misconduct in order to advance his own career. He made a clever ecclesiastical judgment, shall I say? His judgment was implicitly: let's not rock the boat. That's the kind of guy he is. I presume very few of these guys in the upper echelons are boat rockers.' Sarah Pearson, spokesperson for Survivors Network of those abused by Priests (SNAP), told the Daily Mail that she, too, found it 'pretty hard to believe' that Farrell had no clue about the McCarrick allegations, describing Farrell's proclaimed ignorance as 'implausible'. 'The whole point is that it was an open secret for years,' said Pearson. 'Farrell was McCarrick's chief deputy. He lived with him for years.' Pearson added that survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy 'don't trust' Farrell and are 'uncomfortable' with his position in the church. Yet Farrell's Texas friends are adamant that he is the perfect man for the prestigious papal role, insisting that his calm demeanor, managerial nous and warmth make him a fine choice. Farrell, educated in Dublin and at the University of Salamanca in Spain, was ordained in 1978 and began his career in Monterrey, Mexico. By 1983, he was in Washington DC, where he remained until moving to Dallas in 2007. There, he was instrumental in modernizing and professionalizing their systems to report and investigate sex abuse allegations. 'That wasn't an issue just for Dallas, but in the entire Western world,' Dr Matthew Wilson, the director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Dallas's Southern Methodist University told Daily Mail. 'I was eager to see [Farrell] develop good protocols: not ad hoc responses, but procedures. And he did. He was much more open and communicative than his predecessors, and presided over a zero-tolerance regime - so much so that some criticized him for being too zealous in his investigations of even vague allegations, and felt they didn't have due process,' said Dr Wilson. Though Wilson demurred when asked whether he believed Farrell's insistence that he was unaware of McCarrick's crimes. 'Honestly, I'm not in a position to assess that,' he said. 'I don't know enough to know whether they were personal friends, or just acquaintances. Judge Clay Jenkins, who presides over Dallas County, also praised Farrell's handling of abuse claims while in Texas. 'I don't want to speak ill of [Farrell's] predecessor, but there were some questions about how things had been handled. And I can't speak to every issue, but I can't think of a situation where I had enough knowledge of an allegation of abuse to think Farrell did the wrong thing.' Jenkins further described Farrell as 'disarming, funny, and with business savvy'. He was also pragmatic. In 2012, when Obamacare was introduced, Jenkins told Farrell that he needed his help getting marginalized people to sign up and receive medical care they were entitled to. At the time a Catholic charity was campaigning against it, arguing that the provision guaranteeing access to contraception went against their faith. Farrell weighed up the arguments and decided that 'getting people on healthcare would lead to saving lives and better outcomes, said Jenkins. Farrell then placed tables with sign-up sheets outside his churches. In 2014, when unaccompanied migrant children were stranded at the US-Mexico border, Farrell was 'instrumental' in bringing them to Dallas and securing safe accommodation. Later that year, when America's first Ebola patient landed in Dallas, Farrell opened the doors of his church retreat to the man's wife and family, to escape intrusive neighbors and global media crews. 'We help people because we're Catholics, not because they are,' said Farrell at the time. Jenkins and others who spoke to all repeated his line. 'We dealt with crises - police shootings, Ebola, mass casualty events, flooding, tornadoes - and saw each other outside of that too,' said Jenkins. 'He was calm, cool. Not only a colleague, but also a friend.' In 2016, Pope Francis summoned Farrell to Rome and made him a cardinal, appointing him camerlengo in 2019. Reverend Joshua Whitfield was accepted by Farrell into his diocese, despite being married with five children. Whitfield was an Anglican minister before converting, making him one of only a handful of Catholic priests with spouses. Farrell, he says, was unfazed. 'In any situation he'll find the good in a person,' said Whitfield. 'He's caring, and with a brilliant mind. We all thought he could run a Fortune 500 company, he has that type of brain. He really knew how to run an organization.' Whitfield said he was well-placed to stage the conclave, praising his 'creative Catholicism that refuses to be captured by either side.' He last saw Farrell in November, when he was in Rome for a week. 'He said to meet him at Saint Anne's Gate, and we drove off in his Volkswagen to a little off-the-beaten-track Italian restaurant,' Whitfield recalled. 'I asked him about the conclave. And he wasn't looking forward to it, per se. But he definitely felt he could do it.'
Herald Malaysia
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Herald Malaysia
Clerical sex abuse: Pope Francis' thorniest challenge
Campaigners say he never acknowledged what might be the 'systemic' causes of abuse within the Church Apr 21, 2025 A portrait of Pope Francis is seen on the phone of a faithful while travelling in the subway heading to Buenos Aires Cathedral on April 21, following the death of Pope Francis in the Vatican. (Photo: AFP) By AFP When Pope Francis took over in 2013, the Catholic Church was embroiled in a global scandal over child sex abuse by priests and the institution's attempts to cover it up. The pontiff sanctioned top clergy and made reporting abuse mandatory, but victims said more can and must be done. Criticized commission In December 2014, Pope Francis established an international panel of experts to recommend how to protect minors, but the commission was mired in controversy from the start. Two members representing abuse survivors resigned in 2017, including Marie Collins, who was raped by a priest in Ireland when she was 13 years old and who decried as "shameful" the lack of cooperation from Vatican officials. In March 2023, the commission's last remaining founding member, prominent German Jesuit priest Hans Zollner, resigned, expressing concerns over "responsibility, compliance, accountability, and transparency." Turning point in Chile Pope Francis' trip in January 2018 to Chile, where a clerical paedophilia scandal had caused outrage, was a turning point. Francis initially defended a Chilean bishop against allegations he covered up the crimes of an elderly priest, demanding the accusers show proof of his guilt. He later admitted making "grave mistakes" in the case -- a first for a pope. He summoned all of Chile's bishops to the Vatican, after which they all submitted their resignations. McCarrick affair In February 2019, in a historic first, Pope Francis defrocked former US cardinal Theodore McCarrick after he was found guilty by a Vatican court of sexually abusing a teenager in the 1970s. McCarrick had been known for having sex with adult seminarians, and the year before, the Vatican's former ambassador to the United States, Carlo Maria Vigano, accused Pope Francis of ignoring years of allegations against the cardinal. A Vatican report in 2020 acknowledged errors by the Catholic hierarchy and found former pope John Paul II ignored advice against promoting McCarrick, but largely absolved Francis. Unprecedented summit In February 2019, the pope convened the heads of 114 bishops' conferences from around the world with the head of the eastern Catholic Churches and superiors of religious congregations for a four-day summit on "the protection of minors." It heard devastating accounts from abuse survivors and searing criticism from within the Church. German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a close adviser to the pope, dropped the bombshell that bishops' offices might have destroyed files on clerical abuse suspects. The pope promised an "all-out battle" against abuse, comparing child sex abuse to human sacrifice. Legal changes In December 2019, the pope made complaints, testimonies and documents from internal Church trials available to lay courts. Victims were able to access their files and any judgements. The same year, he made it compulsory to report suspicions of sexual assault or harassment to Church authorities -- and any attempt at a cover-up. In 2021, the Catholic Church updated its criminal code for the first time in nearly 40 years to include an explicit mention of sexual abuse by priests against minors and disabled people. However, victims continued to complain that clergy were still not obliged to report abuse to civil authorities under Church codes, and anything said in the confessional box remained sacrosanct. A mixed record On his foreign trips from Canada to Belgium, Pope Francis met with survivors of abuse and regularly issued calls for forgiveness. But while he did the most of any pope to combat the scourge, campaigners say he has never acknowledged what might be the "systemic" causes of abuse within the Church. He was criticised for not meeting the authors of a major report into sexual abuse within the Church in France, and urging caution in interpreting its claim that about 330,000 minors had been abused over 70 years. Critics also say he should have been more decisive with Marko Rupnik, a Slovenian priest and world-renowned mosaic artist, accused of abusing a community of adult religious women in the 1990s. Under pressure, the pope waived the statute of limitations in 2023 to allow potential disciplinary
Time of India
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Did Pope Francis make real progress in addressing clerical sex abuse? What you need to know
When Pope Francis took over in 2013, the Catholic Church was embroiled in a global scandal over child sex abuse by priests, and the institution's attempts to cover it up. The pontiff sanctioned top clergy and made reporting abuse mandatory, but victims said more can and must be done. Criticised commission In December 2014, Pope Francis established an international panel of experts to recommend how to protect minors, but the commission was mired in controversy from the start. 5 5 Next Stay Playback speed 1x Normal Back 0.25x 0.5x 1x Normal 1.5x 2x 5 5 / Skip Ads by by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like The Top 20 Most Expensive Cars Two members representing abuse survivors resigned in 2017, including Marie Collins, who was raped by a priest in Ireland when she was 13 years old and who decried as "shameful" the lack of cooperation from Vatican officials. In March 2023, the commission's last remaining founding member, prominent German Jesuit priest Hans Zollner, resigned expressing concerns over "responsibility, compliance, accountability and transparency". Live Events ALSO READ: How Pete Hegseth invited multiple controversies for himself in less than a month? 10 points Turning point in Chile Pope Francis's trip in January 2018 to Chile, where a clerical paedophilia scandal had caused outrage, was a turning point. Francis initially defended a Chilean bishop against allegations he covered up the crimes of an elderly priest, demanding the accusers show proof of his guilt. He later admitted making "grave mistakes" in the case -- a first for a pope. He summoned all of Chile's bishops to the Vatican, after which they all submitted their resignations. McCarrick affair In February 2019, in a historic first, Pope Francis defrocked former US cardinal Theodore McCarrick after he was found guilty by a Vatican court of sexually abusing a teenager in the 1970s. McCarrick had been known for having sex with adult seminarians, and the year before, the Vatican's former ambassador to the United States, Carlo Maria Vigano, accused Pope Francis of ignoring years of allegations against the cardinal. A Vatican report in 2020 acknowledged errors by the Catholic hierarchy and found former pope John Paul II ignored advice against promoting McCarrick, but largely absolved Francis. ALSO READ: 'Very perilous time in America...': 'Shame' chants echo across US as thousands protest Trump, over 700 events held Unprecedented summit In February 2019, the pope convened the heads of 114 bishops conferences from around the world with the head of the eastern Catholic Churches and superiors of religious congregations for a four-day summit on "the protection of minors". It heard devastating accounts from abuse survivors and searing criticism from within the Church. German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a close adviser to the pope, dropped the bombshell that bishops' offices might have destroyed files on clerical abuse suspects. The pope promised an "all-out battle" against abuse, comparing child sex abuse to human sacrifice. Legal changes In December 2019, the pope made complaints, testimonies and documents from internal Church trials available to lay courts. Victims were able to access their files and any judgements. The same year, he made it compulsory to report suspicions of sexual assault or harassment to Church authorities -- and any attempt at a cover-up. In 2021, the Catholic Church updated its criminal code for the first time in nearly 40 years to include an explicit mention of sexual abuse by priests against minors and disabled people. However, victims continued to complain that clergy were still not obliged to report abuse to civil authorities under Church codes, and anything said in the confessional box remained sacrosanct. A mixed record On his foreign trips from Canada to Belgium Pope Francis met with survivors of abuse and regularly issued calls for forgiveness. But while he did the most of any pope to combat the scourge, campaigners say he has never acknowledged what might be the "systemic" causes of abuse within the Church. He was criticised for not meeting the authors of a major report into sexual abuse within the Church in France, and urging caution in interpreting its claim that, about 330,000 minors had been abused over 70 years. Critics also say he should have been more decisive with Marko Rupnik, a Slovenian priest and world-renowned mosaic artist accused of abusing a community of adult religious women in the 1990s. Under pressure, the pope waived the statute of limitations in 2023 to allow potential disciplinary proceedings.
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Yahoo
Theodore McCarrick, powerful cardinal whose career ended in disgrace over accusations of sexual abuse
Theodore McCarrick, who has died aged 94, was for decades one of the key players in American Catholicism. His spectacular downfall, amid a welter of accusations of sexual misconduct, which resulted in him being deprived of his Cardinal's hat, marked his career out as one that illustrated not just the strengths but also the spectacular weaknesses of American Catholicism. To many, faithful or not, the career of McCarrick was indicative of a Church leadership that had lost its way. Born in New York on July 7 1930, the only child of Theodore McCarrick and his wife, Margaret, née McLaughlin, Theodore Egan McCarrick – Ted, as he was always known – had the misfortune to lose his father aged three. His widowed mother became a factory worker in the Bronx. She and her son lived in Washington Heights, and were supported by a large network of relations and friends. McCarrick was an altar boy at his local parish church, and attended his local Catholic school, later going on to Fordham Prep, a Jesuit-run secondary school. On leaving school, thanks to the kindness of a benefactor, whose identity remains a mystery, he studied in Europe for a year and a half before returning to Fordham University, his mind already made up to study for the priesthood. He entered St Joseph's Seminary, Yonkers, and was ordained by the flamboyant Cardinal Spellman (famous for his extravagant lifestyle and his friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy) on May 31 1958 in New York. Further studies followed in social sciences, culminating in a PhD in sociology from the Catholic University of America in Washington. In 1965, while still in his mid-thirties, McCarrick was appointed president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. After four years, having made a success of the university, Monsignor McCarrick (as he then was) was recalled by Cardinal Cooke to New York, first to work in the archdiocese's education department, then to be his private secretary. Thanks to Cooke's patronage, McCarrick's promotion was rapid. In 1977 he became an auxiliary bishop in New York. In 1981 he was appointed the first Bishop of Metuchen, a newly established diocese in New Jersey. In 1986 he became Archbishop of Newark and in 2001 he was installed as Archbishop of Washington, and later created a cardinal. He served in Washington for five years before reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75 in 2006. In his 30 years as a bishop, and long after his retirement, McCarrick was an indispensable figure in American Catholicism. In 1986, and again in 1992, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops elected him to head its Committee on Migration. In 1992, he also was appointed to head the Committee for Aid to the Church in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1996 he became chairman of the Committee on International Policy, and in 2001 as chairman of the Domestic Policy Committee. He also served on committees dedicated to administration, doctrine, the laity, Latin America and the missions. All of this made McCarrick a spokesman for the Church on fashionable matters and their link man with the administration in Washington. When George W Bush arrived in the city as president, he and his wife's first private dinner engagement outside the White House was with McCarrick. McCarrick was also a founding member of the Papal Foundation, and served as its president. This body, composed of bishops and rich laypeople, was designed to raise money for Papal initiatives, and its spectacular success won the Cardinal great respect in Rome, a place traditionally suspicious of 'Anglo-Saxon' clerics. McCarrick became a frequent visitor to the Vatican, serving on the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples, the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See. Having made human rights advocacy one of his major interests, McCarrick became an indefatigable traveller, visiting China, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Rwanda and Burundi, as well as many countries in Eastern Europe and Central America, often on behalf of the Vatican. In November 1996 he joined the US Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad, and from 1999-2001 he was a member of the US Commission for International Religious Freedom. In December 2000 President Clinton gave him the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights. Under his guidance, the Archdiocese of Washington undertook a major fundraising campaign, Forward in Faith, between 2003 and 2005. The campaign, whose funds were earmarked to support education, vocations, parish and social services, resulted in $185 million in pledges, or $50 million more than the $135 million goal. Forward in Faith was one of the most successful capital campaigns in US diocesan history. McCarrick, in a Church which constantly talked of the option for the poor, was clearly the man with the Midas touch. Unusually for an American, Cardinal McCarrick spoke five languages, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. He took part in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI as the successor to Pope John Paul II in April 2005. He was too old to take part in the conclave that elected Pope Francis in March 2013, being over 80, but took part in the preparatory meetings, at which he was thought to have exercised considerable influence in favour of the election of Cardinal Bergoglio. Several of the men later promoted by Pope Francis were well known protégés of McCarrick. And yet throughout this glittering ecclesiastical career, it was well-known to many that McCarrick was a predatory homosexual with a penchant for handsome seminarians, in which he took a more than paternal interest. There was widespread gossip about what went on at his beach house, where seminarians would be invited to stay the night, and where there were never enough beds to go round, meaning one would always have to share a bed with McCarrick. But no one was ever prepared to go on record and denounce McCarrick. A concerned group of Catholics had tried to prevent his appointment to Washington, and travelled to Rome to do so, but their concerns were brushed aside on the grounds that there was no proof of misbehaviour. It was only in 2018, after McCarrick had long retired, that the floodgates of accusations opened. It was alleged that some five decades previously, while secretary to Cardinal Cooke, he had groped an altar boy who was being fitted for a cassock. At the same time, the dioceses of Metuchen and Newark admitted that they had made financial settlements to two former seminarians who had suffered McCarrick's attentions decades previously. In the wake of this came explosive allegations that McCarrick had abused a man, a close family friend, for more than 20 years, starting when he was 11. The Vatican acted first by suspending McCarrick from priestly ministry, and then by accepting his resignation as a cardinal (an almost unprecedented move), and sentencing him to a life of prayer and penance, as well as close confinement in a house of their choosing until such a time as a canonical trial could take place. In the meantime, one of America's most popular and feted clerics became the object of growing condemnation, stripped of various honorary degrees and reviled by all, while his former friends maintained a strict silence. Various Catholic bishops, including one who had shared a flat with the fallen Cardinal, declared that they had known nothing about his double life – something many found hard to believe. In person McCarrick had great charm, and as a celebrity priest he had been a friend of Bing Crosby and the Hearst family, among other famous American Catholics, all of whom were generous towards the causes for which he was raising funds. The seminarians he favoured were encouraged to call him Uncle Ted, and were frequent recipients of friendly, often affectionate, letters. In dress, McCarrick was rather shabby, and in demeanour he always affected to be a man of simple piety who never forgot his working class background and his deprived childhood. Many took this persona at face value. Yet he was also a man of enormous ambition, a skilled politician and shrewd manipulator. He took great pains to be as close as possible to Pope (now Saint) John Paul II, being, as one clerical observer put it, 'a genius at schmoozing'. It was this cultivation of the powerful that perhaps guaranteed his immunity from scrutiny and his continued high profile, even in retirement, for so long. Theodore McCarrick, born July 7 1930, died April 3 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Yahoo
Ex-Newark Archbishop McCarrick, defrocked after sex abuse scandal, has died, church says
Theodore McCarrick, the former Newark Archbishop expelled from the ministry in one of the Catholic Church's most infamous sexual abuse scandals, has died, according to published reports and a church official. McCarrick, who also led the Diocese of Metuchen in the 1980s, died in Missouri, where he had moved in recent years, according to the National Catholic Reporter, which cited two unnamed sources. McCarrick was 94. His death was confirmed Friday in a statement by Cardinal Robert McElroy of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., where McCarrick also served before his fall from grace. Ordained as a priest in New York in 1958, McCarrick would eventually rise to the level of cardinal and become a prominent voice and prodigious fundraiser for the Vatican. But he was defrocked by Pope Francis in 2019 after a Vatican investigation determined he sexually molested adults as well as children. An internal Vatican investigation found that bishops, cardinals and popes downplayed or dismissed reports of sexual misconduct over many years. McCarrick served as the Bishop of Metuchen from 1981 to 1986 and as Archbishop of Newark from 1986 to 2000, before he was named Archbishop of Washington. He was accused of abuse in at least 10 lawsuits in New Jersey as well as in two criminal cases in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, becoming the only Catholic cardinal in U.S. history to face child sex abuse charges. Some of the alleged assaults were reported at a Jersey Shore beach house, where McCarrick allegedly abused seminary students as far back as the 1980s. His time as archbishop of Newark included the purchase of at least two beach homes, including one tied to a mysterious debt, and a pattern of ignoring abuse allegations against priests under his control. "In his prime he was the prince of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States for decades," said Bruce Novozinsky, an abuse survivor from Monmouth County and author of the book "Purple Reign: Sexual Abuse and Abuse of Power in the Diocese of Trenton." "No one, and I mean no one, that was named bishop in the U.S. of a prominent diocese up to 2014 was given the purple-piping without the McCarrick say-so," he said. "He was also a predator who exchanged career paths to young priests and seminarians in exchange for sex [and] transferred known pedophiles from parish to parish." Father Kenneth Lasch of Pompton Plains, an advocate for victims of clergy abuse, said McCarrick left behind a 'terrible legacy.' Investigation: A timeline of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's rise and fall 'He left a black mark on the Catholic Church and specifically on those people who knew about his proclivities. For years, rumors were circulating about his way of life. I knew about McCarrick's behavior in the 1980s and I went to the vicar of clergy at the Archdiocese of Newark and they said they couldn't do anything about it. So it was known.' 'Of course we have to move on but his story remains a part of church history. It's always going to be there that they [church leaders] defaulted on their responsibility.' One of the criminal cases stemmed from a Bergen County native, James Grein, who said McCarrick molested him repeatedly as a boy and young man, including at a family wedding in Massachusetts. The allegations prompted a prosecution in Massachusetts but that and the Wisconsin criminal case were dropped in recent years after McCarrick was deemed not competent to stand trial. McCarrick denied any wrongdoing. "He groomed me but I escaped by the Grace of God," Grein said in an email to and The Record in 2023. "He may escape punishment from man but his maker will have the final judgment." On Friday, Grein said McCarrick had "ruined my entire life. Completely. The idea that he's gone is freeing." Dugan McGinley, an assistant religion professor at Rutgers University, said McCarrick's story is a lesson that "the Catholic respect for hierarchy needs to be balanced with a healthy dose of vigilance. All church leaders, whether they lean more conservative or liberal, must be held accountable for their actions and inactions. "Just because any pope or bishop is beloved by a certain segment of the church, they are still human, and Catholics should expect transparency from all of them. Hopefully, McCarrick's story will be remembered as a cautionary tale of a church that allowed clericalism to get in the way of justice." This article originally appeared on Theodore McCarrick, defrocked former NJ Catholic archbishop, has died
