A Worldly Priest
Ex-Cardinal McCarrick meets his disgraceful end
THE Roman Catholic Church is sometimes viewed as an impenetrable fortress. To many liberals, that’s exactly the problem.
The church, they think, needs to come of age, modernize its teachings and accommodate itself to the sexual revolution that has been roiling the West since the 1960s.
Yet those who want a church “open to the world” must face an inconvenient truth: Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick championed just this kind for openness. And this emblem of openness, this man who caused so much pain to underage boys and young seminarians under his authority, will be laicized, likely Saturday.
Before last summer’s sexualabuse revelations put an end to his brilliant ecclesial career, McCarrick, as cardinal archbishop of Washington, promoted Catholic chumminess with cultural liberalism. He was a regular visitor to President Barack Obama’s White House. He ran interference for Notre Dame University when it conferred American Catholicism’s highest honor on the pro-abortion-rights Obama. He opposed calls to deny Communion to proabortion-rights politicians. He was beloved at Davos.
An entire generation of boomer-age bishops, priests and theologians claimed that the Second Vatican Council demanded a concordat with liberal values. But no one chanted the mantra of openness louder, or raised more money around its central aims, than did McCarrick.
He personified the spirit that swept the church in the immediate years after the council — one that mistook the council’s teachings for an invitation to endless experimentation and the demolition of ancient moral barriers. McCarrick’s laicization is a judgment not only against the man but also against that rebellious spirit.
But what does laicization mean exactly? In Catholic teaching, ordination to the priesthood “confers a gift of the Holy Spirit” that changes a man and his personal status. A man ordained to the priesthood has the right and duty to exercise a sacred power “which can only come from Christ himself through his church.” This imprint of God’s power can never be erased — but the church can remove an ordained man’s right to exercise the power of that imprint.
A priest can voluntarily choose to set aside this sacred power, which belongs to Christ. Or, as with McCarrick, the church can divest his right to exercise it as a penalty for crimes. The boys and young men who suffered his predations should know that it wasn’t a sacred power that molested them but rather what Saint Paul called “the world” — the damnable human world of degraded desires.
And it is to this world that McCarrick returns.
Pope Francis already removed McCarrick from the College of Cardinals, but the expected laicization will mean that McCarrick can never be called “Father” again.
He has lost his right to be supported by the church. In his lifelong mission to be open to the world, McCarrick cultivated wealthy friends, who no doubt will support him in these final years of shame. He won’t be able to celebrate the sacraments.
Those who continue to cry that “the problem is the church isn’t open enough” haven’t been paying attention. McCarrick’s worldliness was as well-known as his openness. His predations were known to many, as the retired Vatican diplomat Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò insisted.
McCarrick’s brother bishops, the priests under his authority, the teachers at the religious order near whose seminary he lived in retirement — all knew or should have known. As the Catholic News Agency has reported, sometimes the rector of the seminary would warn students to avoid McCarrick’s “worldly tastes,” which included Learjets, casinos and the Jersey beach house, where he is alleged to have abused seminarians under his authority.
That house is now a metaphor and a warning about what happens when churchmen forget the wages of sin.
McCarrick is only the most extreme representative of such forgetfulness. Elsewhere, openness to the world has meant removing the crosses from Catholic classrooms or turning altars around to the face the people rather than the dying Jesus on the cross. Such openness has shifted not only the direction the priest faces during the Mass — but which way he faces in his heart.
There is a good kind of openness, to be sure. The openness that Vatican II actually called for wasn’t an accommodation with the world but a mission to illuminate it with the eternal truths that Christ entrusted to the church.
The kind of openness that McCarrick represents was different. It was desperate to remake the church in the world’s image. This Saturday, Pope Francis will judge justly that McCarrick’s brand of openness has reached its powerless, pathetic end.