Pope accepts resignation of accused US cardinal

Mangalore Today News Network

Vatican City, July 29, 2018: Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a prominent US cardinal who is accused of sexually abusing a teenager nearly five decades ago, the Vatican said on Saturday.

Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, was removed from the ministry in June after a review board found there was “credible” evidence that he had assaulted the teen while working as a priest in New York in the early 1970s. “Yesterday evening the Holy Father received the letter in which Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop Emeritus of Washington (USA), presented his resignation as a member of the College of Cardinals,” the Vatican said in a statement on Saturday.

“Pope Francis accepted his resignation from the cardinalate and has ordered his suspension from the exercise of any public ministry, together with the obligation to remain in a house yet to be indicated to him, for a life of prayer and penance until the accusations made against him are examined in a regular canonical trial.”

McCarrick, 88, is one of the most prominent American cardinals active on the international stage and the charges make him one of the most high-profile Catholic leaders to face abuse claims. Although he has officially retired, McCarrick has continued to travel abroad regularly, including to defend human rights issues. McCarrick was ordained a priest in 1958 and rose through the ranks in the Archdiocese of New York before being installed as archbishop of Washington in 2001, a post he held until 2006.

The claims against him were made public in June by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the current archbishop of New York. Dolan said an independent forensic agency “thoroughly investigated” the allegation.

A review board that included jurists, law enforcement experts, parents, psychologists, a priest and a religious sister then “found the allegations credible and substantiated” and the Vatican ordered McCarrick to stop exercising his priestly ministry.

Senior US church officials said they had received three allegations of McCarrick’s sexual misconduct with adults decades ago, two of which resulted in settlements.

Nuns report abuse by priests: Revelations that a prominent US cardinal sexually abused and harassed his adult seminarians have exposed an egregious abuse of power among Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic, AP/PTI reports from Vatican City. A closer look at the issue shows that cases of abused nuns have emerged in Europe, Africa, South America and Asia, demonstrating that the problem is global and pervasive. Now, some nuns are now finding their voices, buoyed by the #MeToo movement. The sisters are going public in part to denounce years of inaction by church leaders. “It opened a great wound inside of me,” one nun told the AP. “I pretended it didn’t happen.” Wearing a full religious habit and clutching her rosary, the woman broke nearly two decades of silence to tell AP about the moment in 2000 when the priest to whom she was confessing her sins forced himself on her, mid-sacrament. The assault — and a subsequent advance by a different priest a year later — led her to stop going to confession. This week, about half a dozen sisters in a small religious congregation in Chile went public on national TV with their stories of abuse by priests and other nuns — and how their superiors did nothing to stop it. A nun in India recently filed a formal police complaint accusing a bishop of rape, something that would have been unthinkable even a year ago.