The McCarrick Whitewash

T he Vatican has finally released the long-awaited and long-delayed McCarrick Report. The document purports to be a thorough examination of how it was that a man who was widely known to be a sex pest and serial sexual harasser, Theodore McCarrick, was elevated to become a powerful and influential cardinal archbishop of the Diocese of Washington, D.C., and the leading figure in the American Church’s post-sex-abuse reforms. McCarrick was stripped of his cardinal title and laicized over two years ago. Many lay Catholics had hoped that the report would fully expose the rotten influence networks that protected him, possibly leading to the downfall of other senior churchmen who were his proteges and who had to have known about his misdeeds. It would trace precisely how he used his prodigious fundraising skills to protect himself from scrutiny. It would expose the ongoing conspiracy of silent complicity with evil.

Alas.

The Vatican’s secretary of state has issued a McCarrick Report that is overflowing with passive-voiced, bureaucratic ass-covering of a vintage so old and sour it would cause the Borgias and the Chinese Communist Party to pucker up. Ultimately it blames a handful of bums in New Jersey, mostly deceased, and it half-blames, and half-exculpates, the deceased and sainted Pope John Paul II. It also lashes out at the Vatican’s former ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who has for the past several years played the role of whistleblower and slightly unhinged political mystic. The ultimate conclusion is that McCarrick was just such a convincing liar, and sure he was throwing cash around everywhere, but it wasn’t a big deal, no siree.

One can see the root of the problem in the very title, “Report on the Holy See’s Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related to Former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick.” But we’ll get to that. You can read it here.

The scope of the report is rather small and can be reduced to answering three questions: (1) Why did John Paul II make McCarrick an archbishop when Cardinal John O’Connor of New York had warned the pope against this in a letter asserting that McCarrick was a sex abuser? And why did he keep rising? (2) What exactly did Benedict XVI do about McCarrick? (3) Did Francis know?

All three are aimed at countering, explaining away, or drowning in context existing stories in the media that are inconvenient to the current pope. Namely, that there were not just rumors but documented warnings to John Paul II that he ultimately ignored. That Pope Benedict did seem to usher McCarrick into retirement and was reported to have put some kind of restrictions — often ignored — on his public life in retirement. And third, that Pope Francis was told about McCarrick’s ongoing moral crimes by the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S., and he ignored these. Conspicuously unaddressed is the accusation that McCarrick had, under Pope Francis, regained influence in the selection of bishops, namely Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell and Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego.

The bottom line of the report is that Cardinal John O’Connor’s accusations against McCarrick were not well-supported. And that John Paul II was predisposed by his upbringing in Communist-era Poland to believe that accusations of pederasty and sexual deviance were malicious anti-Catholic smears, and so he chose to believe the testimony of New Jersey bishops who likely lied in their attempt to clear McCarrick’s name. That Pope Benedict XVI ultimately dithered over what to do about the retired McCarrick, and that Archbishop Vigano’s claim to have warned Francis can’t be proven.

That’s of course very different from saying it was credible. Every other matter relating to McCarrick is untouched. Most troubling of all is that the report insouciantly insists that the money McCarrick was known to raise and “gift” all around the Church had no effect whatsoever. Take a taste of the report’s summary of the issue:

Overall, the record appears to show that although McCarrick’s fundraising skills were weighed heavily, they were not determinative with respect to major decisions made relating to McCarrick, including his appointment to Washington in 2000. In addition, the examination did not reveal evidence that McCarrick’s customary gift-giving and donations impacted significant decisions made by the Holy See regarding McCarrick during any period.

Even when it is self-exculpating, the Vatican’s report of this is self-contradictory. The money mattered — it was “weighed heavily” — but it didn’t clinch anything. The idea that McCarrick was simply making it rain all the time in the Church like a rapper showing off his boom-boom room on MTV Cribs apparently troubled nobody at all.

Hundreds of other little threads are left unexplored. How was it that experts on clerical sexual abuse knew and spoke openly about McCarrick’s reputation as creepy “Uncle Teddy” back in 2006, and McCarrick was fending off lawsuits throughout that decade, but the future cardinal living with him claimed, implausibly, to have no knowledge of anything beyond what he terms sordid rumors? The idea is ludicrous for anyone with the most passing familiarity with the culture of gossip among Catholic priests. And yet, that same cardinal is set to be in charge of the next conclave? What was it about John Paul II and figures such as McCarrick and Marcial Maciel, both prodigious fundraisers and obvious liars?

Why was McCarrick — so well-known for his reputation — living at a seminary in his retirement? Why was he one day hastily moved out into another parish rectory? What exactly did Cardinal Donald Wuerl, then archbishop of Washington, D.C., know? What about the multiple houses on the Jersey shore? Why did Vatican inquiries into seminaries during these decades not uncover the widespread culture of sexual license and abuse in many of them, which anyone who talks to churchmen knows about, and which is the subject of salacious books, and the bleedingly obvious reason for the dropout of many candidates for the priesthood?

How did it all work?

But that gets to the error behind the report. What is “institutional knowledge” and “decision-making”? The report is a kind of prophylactic against a real investigation. Instead of confessing to the Church the sins of its leaders with a degree of candor and humiliation, the report tells outsiders, if you looked at these selected documents, this is the most you could possibly prove against us. Ultimately, the report itself is a kind of moral heresy.

Instead of approaching the McCarrick case in a forensic — yes, inquisitorial — way, judging the bishops of the Church as men who have duties to the Church and God to confront evil, based on what we know, we have this petty bureaucratic account.

God, save Your church from these wolves.