Former Cardinal Defrocked Over Sexual Abuse Dies

Theodore McCarrick, a onetime Washington, DC, cardinal and a Vatican and US envoy who was removed from the priesthood over sexual abuse, has died. He was 94 and was living in Dittmer, Missouri, the Washington Post reports. The Washington Archdiocese announced Friday that McCarrick had died the day before but provided no other information. "At this moment I am especially mindful of those who he harmed during the course of his priestly ministry," Archbishop Robert McElroy said in a statement, per the AP. "Through their enduring pain, may we remain steadfast in our prayers for them and for all victims of sexual abuse."

After his appointment to the high-profile Washington post in 2001, McCarrick became a major fundraiser for causes espoused by the Roman Catholic Church and a champion of workers' rights, environmental safeguards, and the poor. Fluent in five languages, he was sent by the Vatican as an emissary to global trouble spots, and President Clinton dispatched him to China in 1998 to launch talks about religious freedom, per the Post. That career ended in 2018 when the Vatican suspended him from his priestly duties, after the Archdiocese of New York substantiated accusations that he had sexually abused a teenage boy in the early 1970s. In February 2019, Pope Francis expelled McCarrick from the priesthood after a canonical trial found him guilty of sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians over decades.

A Vatican investigation blamed clergy, including Pope John Paul II, for not stopping the abuse sooner. A Post investigation found he had sent hundreds of thousands of dollars in archdiocese money to clerics involved in looking into the accusations. McCarrick also repeatedly avoided criminal punishment, per the New York Times. "McCarrick was never held accountable for his crimes," the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests said in a statement after his death. "While he was eventually removed from public ministry, defrocked, and stripped of his red hat, he never stood trial for the vast harm he inflicted on children, young adults, seminarians, and others under his power." The victims group added: "The McCarrick story is not just about one man. It is about the system that enabled him." (More Theodore McCarrick stories.)