Cardinal sin costs Catholic leader
FORMER cardinal Theodore e McCarrick has been found d guilty by the Vatican of sex x abuse and defrocked.
The announcement, de-- livered in uncharacteristically blunt language for the Vatican, meant that the 88-year-oldd McCarrick, the former arch-bishop of Washington, DC, be-comes the highest-ranking churchman and the first cardinal to be punished by dismissal from the clerical state.
He was notified of the decision on Friday, which was upheld upon his appeal and approved by Pope Francis.
The pontiff this week will lead a summit of bishops from around the world who have been summoned to Rome to help him grapple with the entrenched problems of clerical sex abuse and the systematic cover-ups by the Catholic Church’s hierarchy.
McCarrick (pictured) is now barred from celebrating mass or other sacraments including confession and from wearing clerical garb.
He is to be referred to as Mr McCarrick.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Holy See’s guardian of doctrinal purity, issued a decree on January 11 finding McCarrick guilty of “solicitation in the sacrament of confession, and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power,” the Vatican said.
On Wednesday, Congregation officials considered his appeal and upheld the decree. The pope “recognised the definitive nature of this decision made in accordance with (church) law, rendering it as ‘res iudicata’,” the Vatican said, using the Latin phrase for admitting no further recourse.
Pope Francis yanked McCarrick’s rank as a cardinal in July after a US church investigation found credible an allegation he fondled a teenage altar boy in the 1970s.
Besides bishops arriving for the sex abuse summit, victims’ rights advocates are also converging on Rome. They are demanding that the pope, other Vatican officials and bishops elsewhere come clean about how McCarrick managed such a meteoric rise through the ranks, despite reports about his sexual life.
“The pope has known from the earliest days of his papacy, or he should have known, that ex-cardinal McCarrick was a sexual predator,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, an advocate at BishopAccountability.org.