Letter confirms Vatican received McCarrick complaint in 2000

VATICAN CITY (AP) — A 2006 letter from a top Vatican official has confirmed that the Holy See received information in 2000 about the sexual misconduct of now-resigned United States cardinal Theodore McCarrick, lending credibility to bombshell accusations of a cover-up at the highest echelons of the Roman Catholic Church.

Catholic News Service, the news agency of the US bishops’ conference, on Friday published the letter from then-Archbishop Leonardo Sandri to the Rev. Boniface Ramsay, a New York priest who made the initial allegation.

Ramsay informed the Vatican in a November 2000 letter about McCarrick’s misconduct with seminarians from Seton Hall University’s Immaculate Conception Seminary. Ramsay, who in 2000 was among the faculty at the seminary, has said he sent the letter at the request of the then-Vatican ambassador because he had heard so many complaints from seminarians that McCarrick would invite them to his beach house and into his bed.

Sandri, now a top-ranked Vatican cardinal who was the No. 3 in the Vatican’s secretariat of state at the time, wrote Ramsay on Oct. 11, 2006, seeking his recommendation for a former seminarian for a Vatican job.

In it, he referred to Ramsay’s 2000 letter, saying, “I ask with particular reference to the serious matters involving some of the students of the Immaculate Conception Seminary, which in November 2000 you were good enough to bring confidentially to the attention of the then-Apostolic Nuncio in the US, the late Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo.”