Pope John Paul II promoted a senior figure in the US Catholic church despite being aware of rumours of his sexual misconduct, a two-year Vatican investigation has found.
The report, published on Tuesday, highlighted failings by successive popes, Vatican officials and US clerics who allowed Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to rise through church ranks despite multiple allegations of abuse.
McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington DC, became the most senior figure in the Catholic church to be defrocked after a Vatican hearing last year found him guilty of sexual crimes in the 1970 and 80s, “with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power”.
Pope Francis, who was accused of ignoring the allegations against McCarrick, ordered the Vatican’s disciplinary branch, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to investigate in October 2018 – more than two decades after the alarm was first raised.
The inquiry heard from 90 witnesses and examined dozens of documents, letters and transcripts from Vatican and US church archives. Its 460-page document said the US church hierarchy was aware of consistent rumours that McCarrick preyed on adult male seminarians, but “credible evidence” did not surface until 2017.
McCarrick has said he had no recollection of child abuse and has not commented publicly on allegations of misconduct with adults. Now aged 90, he is living in isolation.
In 1999, Cardinal John O’Connor advised Pope John Paul II that it would be imprudent to promote McCarrick because of “rumours” of sexual misconduct with seminarians dating back to the 1980s.
An investigation by the Vatican ambassador to the US, requested by Pope John Paul, “confirmed that McCarrick had shared a bed with young men” but said there was no certainty that he had engaged in sexual acts.
In August 2000, McCarrick wrote to Pope John Paul’s private secretary rebutting the allegations. “McCarrick’s denial was believed,” the report said.
Three months later, Pope John Paul appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington DC, one of the most prestigious posts in the US church.
The report said Pope John Paul’s willingness to believe McCarrick’s denial was probably influenced by his experience in his native Poland when the communist government used “spurious allegations against bishops to degrade the standing of the church”.
One of McCarrick’s alleged victims said he had been sexually abused by the cleric from 1971, when he was a 16-year-old altar boy in New York. Another man subsequently claimed he had also been abused as a child by McCarrick, and several former trainee priests alleged they had been sexually harassed by the former cardinal at his New Jersey beach house.
Pope Francis became personally embroiled in the McCarrick case after a retired Vatican diplomat accused the pontiff of being aware of rumours about McCarrick’s behaviour but failing to take action.
In an 11-page testimony, Carlo Maria Viganò, 77, an archbishop and former Vatican ambassador to the US, said there was a “conspiracy of silence not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia”.
He called on the pope to step down, saying: “Corruption has reached the very top of the church’s hierarchy.” The accusations were seized on by Francis’s conservative enemies.
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