Ex-Cardinal McCarrick charged with sex assault
BOSTON >> Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked after a Vatican investigation confirmed he had sexually molested adults as well as children, has been charged with sexually assaulting a teenage boy during a wedding reception in Massachusetts in 1974, court records show.
McCarrick, who was archbishop of Washington, D.C., is the first cardinal in the U.S. to ever be criminally charged with a sexual crime against a minor, according to Mitchell Garabedian, a well-known lawyer for church sexual abuse victims who is representing the man alleging the abuse by McCarrick.
“It takes an enormous amount of courage for a sexual abuse victim to report having been sexually abused to investigators and proceed through the criminal process,” Garabedian said in an email. “Let the facts be presented, the law applied, and a fair verdict rendered.”
McCarrick faces three counts of indecent assault and battery on a person over 14, according to documents filed in the Dedham District Court on Wednesday.
Barry Coburn, an attorney for McCarrick, told The Associated Press that they “look forward to addressing the case in the courtroom,” and declined further comment.
The charges against McCarrick were first reported by The Boston Globe on Thursday.
The man said the abuse started when he was a young boy, according to the court records. The man told authorities during an interview in January that McCarrick was close to his family and would perform wedding masses, baptisms and funerals for them.
The man said that during his brother’s wedding reception at Wellesley College in June 1974 — when he was 16 — McCarrick sexually assaulted him.
The man also described other instances of sexual abuse by McCarrick over the years, including when the man was an adult, the report said.
Authorities began investigating McCarrick after Garabedian sent a letter alleging the abuse to the district attorney’s office, according to the court records.
McCarrick can still be charged in this case because he wasn’t a Massachusetts resident and had left the state, stopping the clock on the statute of limitations, authorities said.
McCarrick, 91, was defrocked by Pope Francis in 2019 after a Vatican investigation confirmed decades of rumors that he was a sexual predator.
The case created a credibility crisis for the church since the Vatican had reports from authoritative cardinals dating to 1999 that McCarrick’s behavior was problematic, yet he became an influential cardinal, kingmaker and emissary of the Holy See’s “soft diplomacy.”
It led to a two-year investigation that found that bishops, cardinals and popes downplayed or dismissed multiple reports of sexual misconduct. An internal investigation report released last year put the lion’s share of blame on Pope John Paul II, who appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington, D.C., despite having commissioned an inquiry that confirmed he slept with seminarians.
Anne Barrett Doyle, cofounder of the online research database BishopAccountability.org, said that “for McCarrick, today’s reckoning is long overdue.”