Theodore McCarrick is dead, and his ghost haunts the Church

Charles Collins/Crux• April 6, 2025

I remember the first time I heard about then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick sharing a bed with young seminarians. 

It was 2002, and I was working at the Vatican. A co-worker told me how he had taken part in a weekend retreat with McCarrick years earlier, when he was a seminarian and McCarrick was a bishop. It was two to a bed in the house, and he was assigned to share with McCarrick.

He said McCarrick only placed a hand on his shoulder before falling asleep, but he also said he had heard stories of more “intimate” encounters between McCarrick and others in similar circumstances.

It was then I learned that McCarrick’s nickname was “Uncle Ted”.

RELATED: Disgraced former cardinal Theodore McCarrick dies at 94

At the time, McCarrick had recently been made a cardinal and was leading the Archdiocese of Washington, DC. Before his appointment to the capital see of the United States, he had led the Archdiocese of Newark, NJ. Prior to that, he had been Bishop of Metuchen, NJ. He began his clerical life as a priest and later auxiliary bishop in New York.

These rumours followed him everywhere: rumours, and rumours of rumours. Several journalists heard them and pursued the story, but no one was willing to speak on the record.

Through it all, McCarrick continued to rise through the ranks.

“The allegations against McCarrick had been an open secret for years,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, in a statement issued on Friday following the disgraced former cardinal’s death.

“His fellow cardinals and bishops knew; a cadre of high-ranking Vatican officials knew; Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI knew; and Pope Francis knew or should have known,” Doyle said.

“Yet until the publicity surrounding the case in 2018,” she continued, “not one of these powerful men reported him to law enforcement, alerted the public, or even forced his removal from ministry. The Church protected the influential cardinal’s reputation and ignored or discredited his victims.”

“If even one of his brother bishops had called the police,” Doyle added, “McCarrick might have been prosecuted years or even decades ago.”

The publicity around the case led to McCarrick resigning the red hat in 2018. He was laicised in 2019. The former cardinal died on Thursday at the age of 94.

Why was McCarrick able to act as he did for so long? There are various theories.

For one thing, McCarrick was a prodigious fundraiser. He was famous as a money machine, and made powerful friends along the way, both in the United States and in Rome.

“Uncle Ted” also oversaw a large number of priests during his years in ministry, many of whom have since risen through the hierarchy.

Over the past decade, we have heard from many such figures – now bishops and even cardinals – who have issued detailed statements claiming they never heard of the accusations against McCarrick, or, if they had, they did not consider them “credible”.

Much like a 29-year-old new employee at Vatican Radio, other Church workers found it easy to adopt the attitude that if “it isn’t my job, it isn’t my problem”.

“Arguably,” Doyle went on to say, “no other case in the history of the abuse crisis exposed the complicity of as many high-level Church officials.”

Arguably.

The Rupnik affair must be a close second, and there remains a very great deal for reporters to uncover concerning the sordid conduct of Father Marko Rupnik and the churchmen who enabled him, or at least failed to stop him, for decades.

Rupnik is the disgraced Slovenian celebrity mosaic artist accused of spiritually, psychologically and sexually abusing dozens of victims, most of them women Religious.

A former Jesuit, he was expelled from the Society of Jesus for disobedience after refusing to comply with restrictions placed on him once his abusive behaviour came to light. Rupnik is currently a priest in good standing – still – and awaiting trial.

“The revelations of the crimes of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick changed how the Vatican and Pope Francis publicly respond to the clergy abuse crisis,” Doyle said.

“Without the public pressure this case brought to bear on Rome in 2018, it’s likely that Francis would not have convened his global abuse summit, or enacted his so-called accountability law, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, in 2019,” she added.

Vos Estis Lux Mundi was issued to challenge the “not my job, not my problem” attitude and to create firm requirements for reporting sexual abuse in the Church. But a law is only as effective as its enforcement.

Pope Francis has long faced accusations that he tends to believe the protestations of innocence from clerics over the testimony of victims. The Rupnik affair is not the only high-profile case to touch the Pope personally.

Francis took the word of Chilean Bishop Juan Barros – that was in January 2018, months before the McCarrick case erupted into worldwide scandal – and he trusted Argentinian cleric Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta for years, despite objections raised by victims. Zanchetta was quietly allowed to resign for “health reasons”, and a position was later created for him in the Vatican bureaucracy.

Francis eventually reversed course on both Barros and Zanchetta, but only after sustained public outrage informed by determined local and Vatican reporting.

Earlier this year, the Vatican Dicastery for Legislative Texts cautioned against publishing “news” that would harm the reputation of an individual, particularly someone deceased, when it concerned priests accused of abuse but not found guilty in civil or canonical procedures.

Given that such accusations – even before legal verdicts – have been the primary means by which many clerical abusers have come to light, and that this is, in fact, how journalism often works, there is ample reason to question whether the Church has learned the necessary lessons.

Theodore McCarrick is dead, but his ghost haunts the Church.

 (Photo by Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images)