Disgraced ex-cardinal McCarrick moves to church housing in Kansas
Theodore McCarrick, the first cardinal in U.S. history to resign due to sexual abuse allegations, will remain in church housing. But he’ll be a long way from Washington, D.C., where he served as archbishop and frequent friend of those in power from 2001 to 2006 and remained a globetrotting diplomat long after: The 88-year-old archbishop has moved to a friary in Kansas, the Archdiocese of Washington announced on Friday.
Bishop Gerald Vincke, the leader of the Diocese of Salina, Kan., said he doesn’t know why the friary in his diocese was chosen to house Cardinal McCarrick, but he has a guess: “It’s very remote,” he said by phone on Friday. “When you’re in the friary, you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere.”
Bishop Vinckewas less than a month into his new role as bishop when his secretary told him Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., the former bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, was trying to reach him. Bishop Vincke was in Rome at a training for newly ordained bishops. He called Cardinal Wuerl and they talked for several minutes.
Cardinal Wuerl said that he’d already gotten approval for Bishop McCarrick to move to the friary from the Rev. Christopher Popravak, who leads the Franciscan Capuchin community of friars there.
Bishop Vincke didn’t ask Cardinal Wuerl why he chose Victoria, Kan., which is about 200 miles from Topeka.
Cardinal McCarrick was removed from ministry in June due to an allegation that he molested a teenage altar boy who was preparing for a Christmas service, nearly 50 years ago. After that, another man came forward to say he had been abused by Cardinal McCarrick as a minor. And two New Jersey dioceses that Cardinal McCarrick led before he came to Washington revealed that they had settled lawsuits in the 2000s with two men who said Cardinal McCarrick harassed them as adults.
“This whole summer that we’ve had with this clergy abuse scandal, he’s kind of at the forefront,” Bishop Vincke said. “If I get angry at anybody about it, it’s him. First of all, what he allegedly did —- that is one aspect. The second aspect is that people seemed to know about this and nothing was done, which is really mind-boggling to me, how that all happened. And if people did know, how did he become a cardinal? It doesn’t make any sense.”
That is the question that many have been asking of Cardinal Wuerl, Cardinal McCarrick’s successor in Washington, and of Pope Francis, especially since Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò alleged in a letter that the pope knew about Cardinal McCarrick’s harassment of young adult seminarians and priests for years.
Cardinal Wuerl has said repeatedly that he never heard any allegations against Cardinal McCarrick before this summer. But, facing additional criticism of his handling of abuse cases when he was bishop of Pittsburgh, Cardinal Wuerl has pledged to discuss his potential resignation.