Vatican faults many for McCarrick’s rise, spares Francis

ROME — A Vatican investigation into former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has found that a series of bishops, cardinals and popes downplayed or dismissed reports of sexual misconduct with seminarians, and determined that Pope Francis merely continued his predecessors’ handling of the predator until a former altar boy alleged abuse.

The Vatican took the extraordinary step Tuesday of publishing its two-year, 449-page internal investigation into the American prelate’s rise and fall in a bid to restore credibility to the U.S. and Vatican hierarchies, which have been shattered by the McCarrick scandal.

The report put the lion’s share of blame on a dead saint: Pope John Paul II, who appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington D.C., in 2000, despite having commissioned an inquiry that confirmed he slept with seminarians.

But the report also charts the alarm bells that sounded — and were ignored, excused or dismissed — nearly a decade earlier, when in 1992-93 a series of six anonymous letters were sent to U.S. church officials and the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S. alleging McCarrick was a “pedophile” who would sleep in the same bed with young men and boys.

McCarrick, 90, was defrocked by Francis last year after a Vatican investigation confirmed decades of allegations that the globe-trotting envoy and successful church fundraiser had sexually molested adults as well as children.

The findings accused bishops dead and alive of providing the Vatican with incomplete information about McCarrick’s behaviour.