Report blames John Paul II for McCarrick’s rise

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 twoyear, 449page 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.

A summary of the report from the Vatican 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. The summary says John Paul believed McCarrick’s lastditch, handwritten denial.

But the report also charts the alarm bells that sounded — but were ignored — nearly a decade earlier, when in 1993 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. The ambassador destroyed the letters, and the U. S. church had a policy at the time of not taking action based on anonymous reports of abuse — a practice that was recently reversed by the Vatican for the church at large.

McCarrick, 90, was defrocked by Francis last year after a Vatican investigation confirmed decades of allegations that the globetrotting envoy and successful church fundraiser had sexually molested adults as well as children. The Vatican had reports from authoritative figures dating back to 1999 that McCarrick’s behavior was problematic, yet he continued to rise to become an influential cardinal, kingmaker and emissary of the Holy See’s

“soft diplomacy.”

The findings accused bishops dead and alive of providing the Vatican with incomplete information about McCarrick’s behavior, and of turning a blind eye to his repeated flouting of informal restrictions ordered up in 2006 after Pope Benedict XVI decided not to investigate or sanction him seriously.