McCarrick report shows previously unknown anonymous letters

The Vatican’s report on ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick revealed the previously unknown contents of six anonymous letters accusing him of pedophilia that were sent to U.S. church leaders in the early 1990s and later forwarded to the Holy See.

New York’s then- archbishop, Cardinal John O’Connor, forwarded them to the Vatican in 1999, shortly before he died, along with a six-page confidential memo in which he recommended McCarrick not be promoted to any important U.S. diocese because of a “scandal of great proportions“that would erupt if the allegations became public.

The 449-page report also included testimony from a woman identified only as “Mother 1” who told Vatican investigators she, too, tried to raise the alarm with anonymous letters in the 1980s when McCarrick was bishop in Metuchen, New Jersey, after she saw McCarrick “massaging (her sons’) inner thighs” at

her home.

The woman said she sent the letters to members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy “expressing her distress about McCarrick’s conduct with minors,” and she believed they “may have been thrown aside” because they were anonymous.

Jeff Anderson, an attorney for several of McCarrick’s accusers, said at a news conference Tuesday that he also represents two people in the woman’s family and criticized the church for turning a blind eye to the warning.

There is “no evidence in this report or anyplace else that that account, that warning, that detailed, courageous effort by that mom in approximately 1984 was even investigated,“Anderson said. “Nobody looked. Nobody asked.”

The other anonymous letters, which were sent in 19921993, were addressed to top U.S. church leaders, the bishops conference and the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S., who reported that he had destroyed them upon receipt.

The Vatican has long ignored anonymous reports about abuse, insisting on receiving signed complaints before initiating any investigation. And the U.S. bishops conference had a policy forbidding the use of anonymous allegations as the basis to start abuse investigations, while requiring the information be passed onto the accused prelate.

The Vatican has now changed that policy for the universal church: According to a new manual issued earlier this year, anonymous reports can be used to justify opening a probe.

Massimo Sambucetti / Associated Press file photo U.S. Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, D.C., shakes hands with Pope John Paul II during the General Audience with the newly appointed cardinals in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican in 2001.