Accused cardinal offers another test for Francis

Pope faces new scandal over abuse allegations

VATICAN CITY — Accusations that one of the most respected U.S. cardinals sexually abused boys and adult seminarians have raised questions about who in the Catholic Church hierarchy knew — and what Pope Francis is going to do about it.

If the accusations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick bear out — including a new case reported Friday involving an 11-year-old boy — will Francis revoke his title as cardinal? Sanction him to a lifetime of penance and prayer? Or even defrock him, the expected sanction if McCarrick were a mere priest?

And will Francis, who has already denounced a “culture of cover-up” in the church, take the investigation all the way to the top, where it will inevitably lead? McCarrick’s alleged sexual misdeeds with adults were reportedly brought to the Vatican’s attention years ago.

The matter is now on the desk of the pope, who has already spent the better part of 2018 dealing with a spiraling child sex abuse, adult gay sex and cover-up scandal in Chile that was so vast the entire bishops’ conference offered to resign in May.

It was apparently an open secret in some U.S. church circles that McCarrick — known as “Uncle Ted” — invited seminarians to his beach house, and into his bed.

While such an abuse of power may have been quietly tolerated for decades, it doesn’t fly in the #MeToo era. And there has been a deafening silence from McCarrick’s brother cardinals about what they might have known and when.

“There is going to be so much clamor for the Holy Father to remove the red hat, to formally un-cardinalize him,” said the Rev. Thomas Berg, vice rector and director of admissions at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, the seminary of the archdiocese of New York.

Berg said the church also needs to take action when celibacy vows are violated.

“We can’t effectively prevent the sexual abuse of minors or vulnerable adults by clergy while habitual and widespread failures in celibacy are quietly tolerated,” he said.

McCarrick, the 88-year-old retired archbishop of Washington and confidante to three popes, was undone when the U.S. church announced June 20 that Francis had ordered him removed from public ministry. The sanction was issued pending a full investigation into a “credible” allegation that he fondled a teenager more than 40 years ago in New York City.

The dioceses of Newark and Metuchen, New Jersey, simultaneously revealed that they had received three complaints of misconduct by McCarrick against adults and had settled two of them.

Another alleged victim, the son of a McCarrick family friend identified as James, came forward in a report in The New York Times and subsequently in an interview with The Associated Press. James said he was 11 when McCarrick first exposed himself to him.

McCarrick has denied the initial allegation of abuse against a minor and accepted the pope’s decision to remove him from public ministry.