When the clergy sex-abuse scandal exploded in the United States in early 2002, then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was a leading public voice in the bishops’ efforts to stop it — even as he was privately denying inquiries from reporters about whether he had ever abused anybody himself.

McCarrick, who died Thursday at age 94, was also a voice of moderation.

Appearing on a Sunday morning talk show in April of that year, the then-archbishop of Washington expressed concern about a hypothetical cleric who had committed sex acts on children many years before “and since then has never had any trouble and the people know and they say, ‘He’s a good man. We don’t have to get rid of him; we’ll monitor him; we’ll take care of him.’”

“Do I say, ‘You’re out?’” McCarrick asked. “I’ve got to pray about it.”

Sixteen years later, McCarrick was out — out of the College of Cardinals and eventually out as a bishop and a priest, over allegations that he molested minors and seminarians and used the sacrament of confession to solicit sex.

Yet by the time he fell from public grace, McCarrick was 87, and the temporal consequences of his actions were limited.

Victims sued him, but the cases stalled. State prosecutors pursued criminal charges against him for sexual assault and abuse of a minor — first in Massachusetts and later in Wisconsin — but judges in both places found him unable to stand trial because of mental deterioration from dementia.

The public scandal led the Vatican to release a 459-page report in November 2020 that attempted to describe how he had risen in prominence in the Church over decades while he ignored or denied quiet but recurring allegations that he sexually abused boys and young men.

The Vatican’s McCarrick Report describes lurid scenes of abusive behavior. An unidentified mother told Vatican investigators that around the mid-1980s she sent letters to various Church leaders saying she saw McCarrick inappropriately touch her young sons and that he introduced them to beer during overnight trips, for example. A priest recounted how McCarrick made unwanted sexual advances toward him when he was a young seminarian at a diocesan beach house.

The Vatican’s investigation also made note of now-deceased bishops who in 1990 reportedly witnessed McCarrick inappropriately touch a young priest at a dinner table.

To the frustration of many — at the time of the report’s release, and still today — the Vatican named no living Churchmen as bearing responsibility for allowing McCarrick, despite evidence of impropriety, to continue to use his positions of authority to sexually assault young men and boys within his sphere of influence.

To the public, McCarrick’s good name continued until Church authorities announced in June 2018 — at least 30 years after he was first accused — that the Archdiocese of New York disclosed it had received credible allegations of sex abuse against him.

Pope Francis asked him to resign as a cardinal. In February 2019, after a Church trial that included eight live witnesses and sworn statements from four others, McCarrick was found guilty of “solicitation during the Sacrament of Confession and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power,” according to the McCarrick Report.

The Sixth Commandment, which bans adultery, in Church terms refers more broadly to sexual sins.

Pope Francis dismissed McCarrick from the clerical state. After 60 years in ministry, McCarrick spent his last six years living as a layman.

For some, the April 4 announcement of McCarrick’s death stirred emotions not far from the surface.

James Grein, 66, of Virginia, who has publicly accused McCarrick of sexually abusing him over the course of 20 years, said his reaction ran from sadness to euphoria during the hour after a friend called him to let him know that McCarrick had died.

“The first thing I did was I said a prayer for him,” Grein told the Register. “But I didn’t finish the sentence.”

Brilliant Half-Orphaned Only Child

Theodore Edgar McCarrick was born on July 7, 1930, in New York City. His father was a Merchant Marine captain often away from home; he died of tuberculosis when McCarrick was 3.

His mother worked to support her son, whom she largely left in the care of her sister.

“He practically grew up outside of his own family,” states a May 2008 report from a papal nuncio quoted by the McCarrick Report.

McCarrick was a brilliant student. A November 2023 pre-trial neuropsychological examination found that he “likely is a man of very superior lifelong intellect.”

He entered the seminary in 1954 after graduating from Fordham University. He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of New York in 1958.

McCarrick had a talent for making connections with young families. He frequently visited the homes of parishioners, and he encouraged children to call him “Uncle Ted,” according to the McCarrick Report. His friendly manner and storytelling charmed parents and their children and — according to his accusers — gave him access to victims.

McCarrick served about eight years as secretary to Cardinal Terence Cooke, who ordained him an auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese in 1977, when McCarrick was 46.

He subsequently became the first bishop of the new diocese of Metuchen, New Jersey (1981-1986), and then archbishop of Newark (1986-2000), before becoming archbishop of Washington, one of the premiere posts of the U.S. episcopate.

His influence was felt far beyond his dioceses, as his charm, wit and cash gifts made him a welcome visitor to connected clerics and decision-makers all over the world, according to the McCarrick Report. He also made diplomatic trips on behalf of the United States and the Holy See.

As a bishop, McCarrick was a prodigious fundraiser who moved easily among heavy donors.

While leading the Archdiocese of Washington, McCarrick gave more than $600,000 to well-placed Churchmen from the “Archbishop’s Special Fund” account he maintained, according to a December 2019 report in The Washington Post that cited financial records the newspaper obtained.

Yet behind the scenes, persistent rumors and confidential allegations of sexual misconduct got in his way.

Around the late 1990s, when McCarrick was the archbishop of Newark, he campaigned to succeed Cardinal John O’Connor as archbishop of New York, according to the McCarrick Report. But Cardinal O’Connor, who was dying of cancer, objected, telling Vatican officials that he had serious doubts about McCarrick.

In August 2000, McCarrick sent Pope John Paul II an artful letter, acknowledging occasional “mistakes” and “lack of prudence” but adding that “in the seventy years of my life, I have never had sexual relations with any person, male or female, young or old, cleric or lay, nor have I ever abused another person or treated them with disrespect.”

John Paul apparently was persuaded, and, according to the McCarrick Report, the Pope said to a cardinal: “‘Tell McCarrick that I believe what he said and I am still a friend.’”

While Cardinal O’Connor’s opposition apparently kept McCarrick from getting the New York post he coveted, the Pope appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington in late 2000.

‘This Is Under Control’

A little more than a year later, in January 2002, The Boston Globe reported that dozens of priests had sexually abused hundreds of children in the Archdiocese of Boston over decades.

Civil lawsuits elsewhere led to revelations of widespread clergy sex abuse in other dioceses in the country, as well. In April 2002, when Pope John Paul II summoned American cardinals to Rome to deal with clergy sex abuse, McCarrick told reporters upon arriving that he expected a wide-ranging discussion.

“I think we’ll talk about whatever problems we want to talk about, because we want to make sure that we handle this and that we are able say to our people that this is under control, and won’t happen again, and we move in that direction,” McCarrick said.

Around that time, the McCarrick Report states, reporters made inquiries about rumors of McCarrick’s past behavior with seminarians to the communications director of the Archdiocese of Washington. But McCarrick told her the rumors were not true, and the reporters, apparently unable to get people with firsthand knowledge to corroborate them, did not publish the accusations.

In June 2002, as the U.S. bishops met in Dallas, news accounts described McCarrick as a leader in helping come up with new national standards for preventing clergy sex abuse and handling allegations against priests.

Less noticed at the time, the Dallas meeting produced no mechanism for reporting allegations of sex abuse against a bishop — something that wouldn’t happen until Pope Francis established new norms through his apostolic letter Vos Estis Lux Mundi in May 2019, about two months after he laicized McCarrick.

‘Lower Profile’

Doubts about McCarrick in the Vatican led to his relatively quick retirement in May 2006, at the minimum age of 75, according to the McCarrick Report, although Vatican officials agreed to his request to name his successor at the same time, “in order not to give substance to the rumors about him … so that his exit from Washington appears completely normal and not a punishment.”

That same month, Pope Benedict XVI removed Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, from public ministry, based on an investigation finding that Maciel sexually abused boys, girls and seminarians.

But in McCarrick’s case, Vatican officials considered the allegations unproven. The Vatican told McCarrick to adopt “a lower profile” and to “minimize travel for the good of the Church,” according to the McCarrick Report, which also says those requests “were not based on a factual finding that McCarrick had actually committed misconduct and did not include a prohibition on public ministry.” Over time, even those relatively light restrictions were ignored, and McCarrick made occasional overseas trips representing the Holy See.

The report says that Pope Francis, who was elected in 2013, continued the same policy toward McCarrick as before because he “had heard only that there had been allegations and rumors related to immoral conduct with adults occurring prior to McCarrick’s appointment to Washington,” and he believed that his predecessors had reviewed the allegations and rejected them.

After the first public accusation against him — a married man who said that McCarrick sexually abused him during the early 1970s when he was an adolescent altar boy — was announced in June 2018, McCarrick released a written statement that appeared to deny the charges while leaving some room for interpretation.

“While I have absolutely no recollection of this reported abuse, and believe in my innocence, 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,” McCarrick said.

Decline

In later years, McCarrick was seen in public only at court appearances, where his dramatic physical decline was obvious. Now a frail, elderly man, he arrived outside the courthouse in Dedham, Massachusetts, in September 2021, hunched over a walker and wearing a mask.

Though the name was redacted in court records, his accuser in that case was Grein, whose family McCarrick befriended decades ago.

Years after the physical abuse ended, Grein told the Register on Friday, McCarrick maintained a hold on him. In researching his own life, Grein has come across videos of McCarrick’s speeches online. He said he often turns the screen off so he doesn’t have to look at McCarrick, but even that doesn’t solve the problem.

“Hearing his voice on the internet always did strange things to me,” Grein said.

Grein, a churchgoing Catholic, told the Register he last spoke with McCarrick in early 2023, when Grein called him at his nursing home in Missouri.

“This is what I said: ‘I have forgiven you. But I will never forget. You should pray for yourself, and you should pray for me,’” Grein said.

“He said: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

Grein said that while he’s not celebrating McCarrick’s death, he sees it as a positive development.

“I’m just really happy that he’s no longer with us on the earth, and he can’t do any harm to anybody, especially himself,” Grein said.

“It’s a good thing for us, the victims. It’s a good thing for the Catholic Church. They no longer have to worry about him,” he said. “And it’s best for the world that he’s gone.”