RIP Theodore McCarrick – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

There are some lives that even the most optimistic among us dare not eulogize; Theodore E. McCarrick’s life might very well fall into that category.

Once the highest prelate of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, the former cardinal and archbishop of Washington was defrocked and forced to resign in 2018 after it was revealed publicly that he had been sexually abusing minors and seminarians for years. McCarrick died April 3 at the age of 94, in a home run by a religious order in Missouri.

It’s difficult to overstate the amount of damage McCarrick caused the American Catholic Church. By the time the allegations against him were made public, he had spent nearly seven decades developing his ecclesiastical career, he was well-regarded publicly, had served as an ambassador of the Holy See, and was leading the preeminent diocese in the United States. What 2018 revealed was that, simultaneously, he had left behind him a trail of victims — from an altar server he had molested in 1971 and 1972, to a teenager assaulted during a wedding reception in 1974, to dozens of seminarians he had crossed paths with over several decades. 

The revelations sent shockwaves ripping through the Church — shockwaves that wrested open a carefully constructed curtain of cover-ups. 

It wasn’t so much that it was the first time a cleric had ever been accused of something like this, or even that the cases of sexual misconduct reported were so incredibly extensive; rather, it was that the whole McCarrick affair implicated a number of clerics in the Catholic Church’s hierarchy. As Bishop Steven Lopes said in an interview just after the allegations went public, “We all knew.” 

While McCarrick faced ecclesiastical repercussions — not only was he forced to resign and step down from the College of Cardinals, he was stripped of his priesthood and dignity — the men who knew (or suspected) what was happening when it happened never did. 

At the time, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, testified that the current bishops of Chicago and Newark, Cardinal Blase Cupich and Cardinal Joseph Tobin respectively, “were orchestrated by McCarrick, Maradiaga and Wuerl, united by a wicked pact of abuses by the first, and at least of coverup of abuses by the other two.” (Viganò has since, somewhat justifiably, faced excommunication for his refusal to “recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff.”) 

More broadly, the Pillar noted that the large cash gifts McCarrick was known to have doled out during his episcopacy likely came from “unaudited diocesan slush funds” and “might have paved the way to his promotions within the Church, or compelled bishops, some of whom might still be in ministry, to ignore or cover-up McCarrick’s misdeeds.”

Even while he faced a flurry of accusations, investigations, and subsequent charges, McCarrick maintained his innocence in a statement published in 2018. A year later, he protested to journalist Ruth Graham, “I’m not as bad as they paint me,” adding that he did not “believe that I did the things that they accused me of.” 

By the time he was being psychologically evaluated to stand in a court of law in 2023, he couldn’t remember words like “trial,” “necklace,” or “pacemaker,” much less the name of the president of the United States at the time. “I knew him when I was in Washington and he was a vice president … I just can’t remember his name!” 

In August of that year, a Massachusetts judge found that McCarrick’s dementia made it impossible for him to mount a defense and dismissed assault charges. In December 2024, a Wisconsin judge made a similar decision, suspending the case “for the remainder of the former cardinal’s life.” 

Praying For McCarrick the Man

The legacy McCarrick leaves behind is a traumatic one for the laity and a damning one for those clerics who knew about it. While the whole affair ushered in policy reforms and a new method of dealing with instances of clerical abuse coming from the Vatican (reforms that have faced frequent criticism), it also highlighted and deepened the rift between the laity and the hierarchy of men who are supposed to act as their shepherds.

It is tempting to condemn the man, Theodore McCarrick, on the trail of devastation and hurt left in his wake. One could hardly be blamed for coming to the conclusion that a man who did the things McCarrick did deserves whatever justice Dante may have meted out to those who found themselves in the inner ring of the seventh circle of Hell. 

But, while the Catholic Church has declared a great many men to be saints, it has yet to condemn a man to hell. We, after all, are in the midst of celebrating the mercy of God as evidenced by His passion and death on a hill outside Jerusalem. In that spirit of mercy, we can aptly pray for McCarrick the man: Requiescat in pace.

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