South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Letter adds to coverup charge
A 2006 letter from a Vatican official confirms information from 2000 on sex abuse by U.S. cardinal.
VATICAN CITY — A 2006 letter from a top Vatican official confirms that the Holy See received information in 2000 about the sexual misconduct of a now-resigned U.S. cardinal, lending credibility to accusations of a cover-up at the highest echelons of the Roman Catholic Church.
Catholic News Service, the news agency of the U.S. bishops’ conference, published the letter Friday 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 then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s misconduct with seminarians from Seton Hall University’s Immaculate Conception Seminary.
Ramsay, on the faculty at the seminary in 2000, 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 stu- dents 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 United States, the late Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo.”
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, at the center of a storm rocking Pope Francis’ papacy, cited Ramsay’s 2000 letter in his own expose of a cover-up about the McCarrick affair. He named Sandri among a long list of Vatican officials who knew about McCarrick’s penchant for seminarians.
Vigano accused Francis of knowing in 2013 of McCarrick’s misconduct but of rehabilitating him from sanctions purportedly imposed by Pope Benedict XVI.
Sandri’s letter is significant because it corroborates Ramsay’s story and Vigano’s claims. It shows the Vatican knew about allegations against McCarrick in 2000, a year before then-Pope John Paul II made him a cardinal.