Washington-Theodore McCarrick, a Catholic cardinal who was once powerful who was disfigured by Pope Francis in 2019 after an investigation of the Vatican determined that he sexually abused adults and children, died on Friday, according to the Archbishop of Washington Robert Mcelroy. McCarrick was 94 years old.
The McCarrick scandal created a credibility crisis for the church, mainly because there was evidence that the leaders of the Vatican and the US church. They knew that he slept with seminarians but turned a blind eye when McCarrick got on the top of the United States church as an expert in fund collector who advised three popes.
The Vatican’s report on his investigation gave him the greatest guilt of most of a dead saint: Pope John Paul II, who appointed McCarrick Archbishop of Washington, DC, in 2000, despite having commissioned an investigation that confirmed that he lay with seminarians.
The report found that John Paul believed that McCarrick’s last minute written denial: “I have made mistakes and that sometimes I may have lacked prudence, but in the seventy years of my life I have never had sex with any person, man or woman, young or old, client or secular,” McCarrick wrote.
