The Vatican’s McCarrick Report Is a Shameful Whitewash

On Tuesday the Vatican published its long-delayed report on the subject of ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the insatiable sexual predator who served as archbishop of Washington from 2001 to 2006 but continued to wield huge influence in the Catholic Church until 2018, when he was finally exposed by the media and forced to resign as a cardinal.

Less than a week later, it’s becoming clear that the document is a laborious but clumsy whitewash. Let me explain why.

The ostensible purpose of the 500-page report was to explain how McCarrick rose to high episcopal office despite the fact that his beach-house assaults on seminarians were common knowledge among US bishops and Vatican officials for decades. And this it succeeded in doing, more or less.

Arctix Kids Snow Youth... Buy New $19.95 (as of 05:50 UTC - Details) Throughout the report, the finger of blame keeps swiveling back to St John Paul II, who was explicitly warned that ‘Uncle Ted’ McCarrick couldn’t keep his eyes or his hands off cute young men. (One one of his innumerable international plane flights, he was so taken with an airline steward that tried to persuade him to become a seminarian.)

John Paul chose to disbelieve the accusations and accepted McCarrick’s oily assurance that he’d never committed a sexual misdemeanor in his life. It was an outrageous lie, but it worked. JPII arrogantly believed that he could tell a guilty cleric from an innocent one — and that his old friend McCarrick fell into the latter category. Certainly some American bishops hid evidence from the Polish pope, but what John Paul did hear should have been enough to rule out any question of McCarrick being given Washington.

The McCarrick report produced headlines that, on the face of it, were a disaster for the Church. For years it had used the heroic legacy of John Paul II, canonized to huge acclaim in 2014, to distract attention from sexual scandals.‘Vatican Report Places Blame for McCarrick’s Ascent on John Paul II’, said the New York Times. And the Washington Post: ‘Still saintly? Vatican’s new report on McCarrick may complicate the legacy of Pope John Paul II’.

But those, believe it or not, were the headlines the Vatican wanted, and that the report was intended to generate. They’re not unfair. But they are not the whole story, either. The mainstream media were distracted by other this things week. Confronted by a fat document offering a neat storyline — a legendary pope’s reputation battered by shock revelations — they went for the obvious angle.

Western Chief unisex c... Buy New $39.95 (as of 05:50 UTC - Details) In the process, they missed several other storylines — none of them neat, but all of them pointing to a deep-seated culture of corruption in today’s Vatican. And hiding that corruption was the real purpose of the McCarrick report.

The most sensational parts of the document describe McCarrick’s rise to episcopal power from auxiliary bishop in New York to cardinal archbishop of the nation’s capital, via spells as bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey, and archbishop of Newark.

This rise was made possible by many factors, of which John Paul’s gullibility was only one. The future Uncle Ted was a favored nephew, so to speak, of the grandly influential Cardinal Francis Spellman, archbishop of New York from 1938 until 1967. Spellman has himself been accused of sexual misconduct — though we really do need to treat these posthumous claims with caution.

But it seems that McCarrick was earmarked for promotion as early as his teenage years, and as he rose up the hierarchy he was assisted by — and helped construct — a network of senior homosexual clergy who covered up for each other, and authorized massive secret payouts to McCarrick’s victims.

Whether that network still exists is a subject that the McCarrick report seems determined to avoid. It tries to draw a line between the bad old days, lasting into the reign of Benedict XVI, and the transparency of Francis’s pontificate. But, in the process, it tells us that today’s Vatican is anything but transparent.

Kamik Girl’s WAT... Buy New $53.97 (as of 05:50 UTC - Details) The later part of the report has to explain why Cardinal McCarrick was so frantically busy on the international stage from the beginning of Francis pontificate until 2018, when the New York Times revealed that he was accused of assaulting a minor. It tells us: ‘Believing that the allegations had already been reviewed and rejected by Pope John Paul II, and well aware that McCarrick was active during the papacy of Benedict XVI, Pope Francis did not see the need to alter the approach that had been adopted in prior years.’

This is a breathtakingly misleading statement. What was the approach of Benedict XVI to McCarrick? As the report admits, when Benedict finally decided that the McCarrick rumors were credible he removed him from Washington and ordered him to keep a low profile in retirement. McCarrick ignored most of the restrictions placed on him, and Benedict should be criticized for allowing that to happen. But the former archbishop of Washington’s days as a papal confidant and international emissary were over.

Until, that is, Francis took office. The new pope immediately did precisely what the report says he didn’t do. He altered the approach that had been adopted by Benedict. He rehabilitated Theodore McCarrick — not surreptitiously but spectacularly.

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