Uncle Ted Is Dead. Uncle Ted Lives On

'Thus Have We Made The World'

So, Ted McCarrick is dead, and the gristled pervert does not deserve to rest in peace. He never admitted his crimes — and there were many — much less apologized for them. He was like a figure out of Dante’s Inferno — not a grand, operatic damned figure like Farinata, but rather a grasping, cunning, rat-like creature.

At this point, we hardly need to recount the details of his life, but for the uninitiated, here (unlocked) is the New York Times obituary. Excerpts:

The accusations against Cardinal McCarrick, who had helped shape many of his church’s policies for responding to its sexual abuse crisis, were shocking but hardly incredible when they came to light in 2018, after a church investigation concluded that he had molested a teenage altar server in 1971 and 1972 while he was monsignor in New York City. Thousands of priests before him had faced charges of abuse, and the church had paid victims hundreds of millions in settlements. In 2012, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the archbishop of Boston and America’s senior prelate, resigned amid revelations that he had protected pedophile priests for years.

Although Cardinal McCarrick promptly resigned his ministry “at the direction of Pope Francis,” church officials said, he contended that he was innocent, saying he had no recollection of the reported abuse. He cooperated with the church’s inquiry and did not contest its findings. “I am sorry for the pain the person who brought the charges has gone through, as well as for the scandal such charges cause our people,” he said.

Other sexual misconduct allegations against him soon emerged. Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark said that during a McCarrick ministry in Metuchen, N.J., in the 1980s, when Cardinal McCarrick was bishop of the diocese there, three adults accused him of improprieties that led to two financial settlements. And former priests said he had had sexual contact with dozens of New Jersey seminarians, who called him “Uncle Ted.”

In 2018, as the allegations against Cardinal McCarrick widened, the Vatican, moving expeditiously to contain a scandal at the highest levels of the church, announced that Pope Francis had accepted his resignation from the College of Cardinals, suspended him from priestly duties and ordered him into a secluded “life of prayer and penance,” pending the outcome of a canonical trial in early 2019. He temporarily remained a priest, with the title of archbishop, but was stripped of his highest honor, his designation as a cardinal, and church officials said he would no longer be called on to advise the pope or travel on his behalf.

Here is the meat of it:

An investigation by The New York Times in 2018 revealed that members of the church hierarchy had known for decades about accusations that Father McCarrick had preyed on men who aspired to the priesthood, sexually harassing and touching them. In addition, a 60-year-old man, who called himself only “James” in his contacts with The Times, but who subsequently identified himself publicly as James Grein, told the newspaper and Vatican investigators that Father McCarrick, a close family friend, had begun to abuse him in 1969, when he was 11 years old, and that the abuse had continued for almost two decades.

Many of the questions about how Cardinal McCarrick was able to avoid exposure for his crimes seemed to have been answered by a Washington Post investigation in late 2019, showing that starting in 2001, he had sent checks totaling more than $600,000 to some 100 powerful Catholic clerics, including Vatican officials, some of them directly involved in assessing misconduct claims against him. The checks were drawn from a special charity account of the Archdiocese of Washington, where he began serving as archbishop in 2001, The Post said.

They all knew. All the sons of bitches knew. And they did not care. Uncle Ted either bought them off, or they were too interested in preserving the image of the Church to take action. And not just the hierarchy: my path crossed Uncle Ted’s in 2002, when I was a writer at National Review, and a staunch Catholic determined to help the mission to clean out the church — my church, the church I wanted to be safe for my toddler son. I learned from a parish priest of a delegation of prominent lay Catholics who had gone to Rome to warn the Vatican not to move Archbishop McCarrick of Newark to Washington, where he would become a cardinal. Why not? Because McCarrick was a serial abuser.

They met with someone from the dicastery that makes bishops, I was told, gave them the information, and went back to America. Later, McCarrick went to Washington. This priest knew of at least two men who were on that mission, and gave me their names. I contacted them; neither would talk. I am not certain why the first one wouldn’t, but the second told me, “If that were true, I would not tell you for the same reason Noah’s sons covered their father in his drunkenness.” In other words, to protect the Church.

This too was part of the scandal: laymen who knew what was happening, were angered by it, and yet would not say anything publicly, to protect the Church’s reputation.

I was stymied, and didn’t know where to go from there in my inquiries. The next day, my boss called me into his office. He had just received a phone call from a prominent conservative lawyer, a closeted gay man, who said he was acting in a private capacity on behalf of his friend Cardinal McCarrick. According to my editor, the lawyer said that the cardinal knows that Rod Dreher is going to report something “embarrassing, but not criminal” about the cardinal, and would be grateful if the editor would kill the story.

“What on earth are you working on?” said my editor. I had not even had time to brief him, because I had just started making phone calls the day before, and had gotten nowhere meaningful. I told him what was going on, and he said, “Just keep me informed.”

Back at my desk, I phoned the priest who had tipped me off. “McCarrick knows,” I told him. “How is that possible? The only people I told were the two men I called, and they certainly wouldn’t have told him. Did you talk?”

The priest, who was young, conservative, good-hearted, and (at that point) naive, said: “I only told my spiritual director, Father Benedict Groeschel.”

“Oh Father!” I said. “Groeschel called McCarrick and told him.” Then I told the deceived priest about how Groeschel, a hero to us conservative Catholics, was not what he appeared to be in public. His psychological retreat center recycled some abuser priests. More importantly, as conservative as he was, Father Groeschel was a company man to the marrow. He too, I judged, would rather have protected the institution than seen justice done.

A year later, I got a phone call from a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, who was working on a story about Groeschel’s hidden role in the abuse scandal. The reporter, Brooks Egerton, told me he had made many calls to Groeschel’s office seeking comment, but Groeschel would not respond. Egerton knew of my reputation as a conservative Catholic, and hoped that I would be able to convince Groeschel to give his side. I told him I did not know Groeschel, and couldn’t intervene — but that by then, I had judged that Groeschel was one of those church figures who preferred to say whatever he had to say to protect the Church’s image. Egerton reported the story, which was fairly devastating. In his piece, Egerton said that Groeschel declined to comment.

In response, Groeschel said publicly , “I did not decline to be interviewed. I never spoke to Mr. Egerton because I was not at home when he called.” This, of course, was a lie. I know for a fact that Egerton tried on numerous occasions to reach Groeschel, and wanted so badly to get his side of the story that he, Egerton, even reached out to a stranger, me, seeking a way in. Groeschel was perfectly content to lie about all of this, and to besmirch the reputation of a professional journalist seeking the truth. The Catholic League press release containing Groeschel’s response mentioned Egerton’s homosexuality (which had nothing at all to do with the story), and said that the only reason anyone would dare attack Groeschel is because they hate the Catholic Church.

Giving Bill Donohue of the Catholic League the benefit of the doubt, I would imagine that he, like so many Catholics at the time, assumed that the line between good and evil in the scandal ran between liberals and conservatives within the Church. There’s no reason to believe that he knew of Groeschel’s intervention with McCarrick to protect McCarrick from my inquiries. I can’t know what was in Donohue’s mind then, but it was very common in those early years of the scandal for ideologically engaged Catholics of both the Left and the Right to assume that their enemies within the Church were to blame, and their own favored bishops and priests were not guilty. It was not true, as I learned, but my guess (and that’s all it is) is that Donohue simply could not imagine that a priest who had done as much good as Groeschel could ever have done anything wrong. I started out in that same position as a Catholic journalist, but quickly became disillusioned by the facts. I bring the Groeschel stuff up in this McCarrick commentary because his tipping-off of the predatory homosexual McCarrick was the beginning of my education into how the Catholic institution actually was, as opposed to what I, with my convert’s idealism, thought it was.

In the end, I could say nothing about McCarrick in my writing, because under US libel law, you must have solid reason to believe allegations are true. I was completely certain that McCarrick was guilty, but without any accuser willing to go on the record, or without legal documents backing up the allegations, I couldn’t publish. I’ve been accused over the years of cowardice for not reporting it anyway. This is ignorant. If, somehow, McCarrick were not guilty, then I could have been sued into the ground, and so too would the publications for which I was working. And you know, I think this is actually good law. If McCarrick were actually innocent, and I had been deceived by a cabal of priests and others out to destroy him, then a public accusation of sex abuse would have deeply damaged his reputation.

Again: I was certain that he was guilty (but then, Father Neuhaus wrote of his “moral certainty” that the accused Father Maciel was not guilty, and said so — to his everlasting shame, when it all came out later that Maciel was not only guilty, but far more guilty than anybody realized). Still, I couldn’t write about it. I heard over the next few years from several priests with direct personal knowledge of McCarrick’s predatory behavior … but not one of them had the courage to go on the record. They all contacted me hoping that I, as a journalist, would “do something” about all this. But neither I nor any responsible journalist could do anything without their cooperation.

It was not just them. A decade after I first heard about McCarrick and began making my phone calls, I was living in Louisiana, and had been an ex-Catholic for six years, my intellectualized faith unable to withstand the weight of McCarrick and so very much more I had learned about the corruption within the Catholic institution. I received a phone call from a freelance business reporter working on a piece for The New York Times Magazine about McCarrick. His angle: what do you do when the boss who sexually harasses you is a bishop, and you are a priest? Somebody had told the reporter that Rod Dreher might have information helpful to the story, so he called me.

As it happened, that reporter knew everything I did, and far more. He had actually gone digging in a New Jersey courthouse, and found papers documenting financial settlements McCarrick, at the time Archbishop of Newark, had made with one or more victims, I can’t quite recall. Indeed, that reporter found the victim, a former seminarian (or maybe priest), and got an on the record interview with him. The reporter told me that the victim spoke of McCarrick raping him in McCarrick’s Manhattan apartment, and how he (the victim) crawled to the bathroom to vomit in the toilet after his assault.

Thank God it’s finally coming out! I told the reporter. The man told me that he was nearly finished with his investigation, and that he expected to publish in a month or so.

Two months went by — no story. I called the reporter back to ask what was going on. He told me he had no idea. The editor who had commissioned the story had moved on to a magazine job, and the editor that replaced her had been throwing all kinds of obstacles in his path, including making him re-report parts of the piece.

“Is that editor gay?” I asked the reporter.

“Yeah, but why does that matter?” he replied.

I told the reporter (who wasn’t Catholic) about the Lavender Mafia — the network of gay priests and bishops who advance each other’s careers and protect each other. This is not just a clerical thing, I told him. I quoted a prominent left-wing Catholic journalist who had told me back near the beginning of the scandal that the biggest blind spot on his side is the refusal to see the homosexual aspect of the scandal, because the facts violate their preferred narrative. It is possible, I said, that your gay editor does not want this to come out because it stands to fit into a narrative of gay men as sexual predators. The question of legalizing same-sex marriage was just starting to gather steam, and reporting that the most influential US Catholic cardinal is in fact a gay sex predator might hurt the Cause.

Indeed, I told this reporter, back in 2002, a freelance reporter working for the Fox News Channel told me at that year’s big meeting of the Catholic bishops, in Dallas, that she had received orders “from the top of the network” to ignore anything to do with homosexuality. I was gobsmacked by this. Homosexuality, and homosexual clerical networks, does not explain the entire scandal, but you cannot understand it fully without accounting for that. Doesn’t matter, said the reporter: orders are from the top, “don’t go there.”

Now this was Fox News, not a liberal outlet! But that’s how it was back then. Presumably that order came from Roger Ailes, who has since died. Why would he do it? God only knows, but if it was him — or whoever it was — it was probably because most prominent right-wing figures were terrified of being called bigots. That was also a teaching moment for me, about the untrustworthiness of even people on my own side. Many years later, in a very different context, I would learn from Kamila Bendova that when you are faced with an implacable enemy, the greatest quality to look for in allies is not sharing the same religious or political priors, but courage in being willing to stand for the Truth.

In my case, was it courage? Maybe. But I think it’s more truthful to say it was a matter of overwhelming revulsion at both the impurity of what was done (the sexual violation of children) and the refusal of adults who could have dealt with it to do so. You longtime readers will recall my story of being sexually humiliated on a school trip when I was 14 — of the older boys holding me down and threatening to pull my pants down in front of their girlfriends, and me screaming and begging for the two adult chaperones in the room to help me. Those two women stepped over me, lying on the floor unable to move because the bigger boys held me down, to get out of the room, so they would not have to confront the cool kids. The older boys never did take my pants off, and eventually let me go.

But I learned a lesson from that: that those in power cannot be trusted to do the right thing. That they will typically defer to protecting what they believe are their own interests rather than stand up for justice, and the protection of the weak. So, when all this started in 2002 — the scandal revelations, I mean — every bishop I would learn about who stood for abuser priests rather than their victims, they were mitred male versions of those chaperone moms who walked over me, literally, to leave me to my tormentors.

It’s a wonder I held on to my Catholicism for as long as I did.

All that is in the past now. Now that McCarrick has gone on to his judgment, I hope I will never write this story again. It all left me with a permanent suspicion of power and authority, even as I recognize that authority can be both necessary and legitimate. I expect betrayal. I have to, for the sake of protecting my own faith, as well as my own sanity. It’s a shitty way to live, but this is what experience has taught me. I am not surprised that Pope Francis has protected Rupnik, Zanchetta, and other abusers. It’s what people in power do. On abuse, he’s a phony. And look, even though I’m Orthodox now, if my own bishops did the right thing in such cases, I would be pleasantly surprised. That’s how much of a cynic I’ve become. Or rather, a realist.

And there’s this, from Princeton professor Robert George, a faithful Catholic. He posted it to Facebook:

Theodore McCarrick has died. There are bishops, including a number of American bishops, who owe their appointments to him. In their statements about his death, they are, of course, making no mention of that. Why? I fear that it is because he got caught--and defrocked. Had he not, these men would be praising him, and I fear they would be praising him despite an awareness that he was a molester. As things are, their statements are all about concern for his victims.

When McCarrick's crimes were exposed, I called on Pope Francis (in an article published in the Wall Street Journal) to commission an independent investigation into the circumstances of the appointment to episcopal offices of those promoted by him. It didn't happen. Consequently, the shadow of Theodore McCarrick continues to hang over the Church--especially in the United States.

Cardinals Cupich (Chicago), Tobin (Newark), McElroy (DC), Gregory (recently retired from DC) and Farrell (Rome) were all McCarrick allies and proteges. In 2022, before McElroy was given a red hat by Francis as Bishop of San Diego (McElroy, an arch-progressive, has since been moved to Washington to replace Card. Gregory), the tireless Catholic journalist Phil Lawler wrote:

The case against Bishop McElroy is not limited to complaints that he downplayed sex-abuse reports, Miller notes. He also ignored a detailed report on sexual abuse by McCarrick and other prelates, handed to him in 2016—six years before that scandal became public. When he arrived in San Diego, pledging that no predatory priest would remain in ministry in his diocese, he failed to apply that policy to Jacob Bertrand, a priest who had molested a young woman in an act that was blasphemous, felonious, and almost certainly Satanic. A Wall Street Journal column on the case observes that if it were not for state prosecutors, “Father Bertrand might still be in ministry.”

“The Diocese of San Diego never reached out to me,” the victim reports. The diocese received a report on the Satanic abuse in 2014, and took no immediate action. On the contrary, when the victim took her case to civil law-enforcement officials, diocesan lawyers balked at prosecutors’ requests for the accused priest’s records. Only much later would the Church take action, remove Bertrand from priestly ministry, and finally defrock him.

Maybe there is an explanation for Bishop McElroy’s failure to act quickly in this case—although it is very difficult to imagine why a bishop would hesitate to act when a priest is credibly accused of Satanism. Maybe there is an explanation for why he did not meet with Richard Sipe, the researcher who had documented evidence against McCarrick, or with the woman who was subjected to the outrageous Satanic abuse. But on the very best reading, his actions (or rather his inaction) have contributed to a climate of scandal that still afflicts our Church, and to the cynicism of lay Catholics who question whether our bishops are ready to police themselves.

Still I know, and you know, and Leila Miller knows, that Bishop McElroy will receive his red hat in a few weeks, undeterred by our protests. So why raise the issue now?

• Because four years after McCarrick resigned his position, and despite many promises of transparency, we still do not have a full accounting of how he rose to such power and prominence, and how he remained in power even after his misconduct became a matter of common knowledge. Neither the Vatican nor the American hierarchy have seen fit to answer the obvious questions: Who knew, and when did they know, and why didn’t they act?

• Because Pope Francis, despite his rhetoric about cleaning up the scandal, still has not named an American cardinal who is not deeply stained by that scandal.

• Because sometime in the not-too-distant future, the cardinals will be gathered in conclave to select a new Sovereign Pontiff, and it’s chilling to think that some of the cardinal-electors may be vulnerable to blackmail.

Uncle Ted’s influence continues beyond the grave. The past isn’t even past. If the mission of the Church depends on rolling over innocent victims of its perverted clergy, marginalizing them, attacking their families, well, too bad for the victims. The guilt here lies primarily with the hierarchy. But it also lies with lower clergy (people like Groeschel) and Catholic laity, and non-Catholics too, who knew what was happening, or should have known, but instead preferred to protect their own peace of mind.

Yes, no one is more guilty for Theodore McCarrick’s crimes than Theodore McCarrick. But Uncle Ted had accomplices — not all of them in holy orders, and not all of them Catholic (I’m thinking of the media who preferred not to see, until they had no choice).

In Oxford today, I spoke with a young male student, age 21, who is a Christian, but trying to sort out where he is planning to land. He wants to be married one day, and to be a father, and wants to be in a stable church. I brought up the McCarrick thing, not to discourage him from becoming Catholic, but as an example of how you had better not put your trust in institutions, not one inch more than you have to as a matter of faith. Uncle Ted never really had to answer for his crimes. Those who benefited from his influence to advance their careers in the Church are happy to memory-hole him. The pontiff who rehabilitated him after Pope Benedict XVI sidelined the dirty old rapist cardinal won’t have to answer for what he did, not in this life anyway.

One of my favorite films is The Mission, from 1986. I have cued it below to the penultimate scene, after the soldiers of the colonial Spanish and Portuguese slaughtered the Indian converts, and burned the mission to the ground, all for the sake of expanding geopolitical power. The colonial representatives meet with the cardinal who authorized the act, but who did not imagine that it would end so violently. The Portuguese emissary tells the cardinal that hey, it had to be like this.

:“We must work in the world; the world is thus,” he says.

The conscience-stricken cardinal replies: "No, thus have we made the world. Thus have I made it."