Revelations that one of the most respected U.S. cardinals is accuse of sexually abusing both boys and adult seminarians have raised questions about who in the Catholic Church hierarchy knew.
The accusations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick are now on the desk of Pope Francis, who has already spent the better part of 2018 dealing with a spiraling child sex abuse, adult gay priest sex and cover-up scandal in Chile that was so vast the entire bishops' conference offered to resign in May.
On Friday, Francis accepted the resignation of the Honduran deputy to Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, who is one of Francis' top advisers. Auxiliary Bishop Juan Jose Pineda Fasquelle, 57, was accused of sexual misconduct with seminarians and lavish spending on his lovers that was so obvious to Honduras' poverty-wracked faithful that Maradiaga is now under pressure to reveal what he knew of Pineda's misdeeds and why he tolerated a sexually active gay bishop in his ranks.
The McCarrick scandal poses the same questions, and McCarrick's brother bishops have been quiet about what they might have known and when.
"There is going to be so much clamor for the Holy Father to remove the red hat, to formally un-cardinalize him," said the Rev. Thomas Berg, vice rector and director of admissions at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, the seminary of the archdiocese of New York.
Berg said the church needs to ensure that men with deep-seated same-sex attraction simply don't enter seminaries -- a position recently reinforced by the Vatican at large and by Francis in comments to Chilean and Italian bishops.
Berg said the church also needs to take action when celibacy vows are violated.
"We can't effectively prevent the sexual abuse of minors or vulnerable adults by clergy while habitual and widespread failures in celibacy are quietly tolerated," he said.
McCarrick, the 88-year-old retired archbishop of Washington and confidante to three popes, was ultimately undone when the U.S. church announced June 20 that Francis had ordered him removed from public ministry. The sanction was issued pending a full investigation into a "credible" allegation that he fondled a teenager more than 40 years ago in New York City.
The dioceses of Newark and Metuchen, N.J., simultaneously revealed that they had received three complaints of misconduct by McCarrick against adults and had settled two of them.
Another alleged victim, the son of a McCarrick family friend identified as James, came forward in a report in The New York Times and subsequently in an interview with The Associated Press. James said he was 11 when McCarrick first exposed himself to him. From there, McCarrick began a sexually abusive relationship that continued for another two decades, James told The AP.
"I was the first guy he baptized," James told The AP. "I was his little boy. I was his special kid."
McCarrick has denied the initial allegation of abuse against a minor and accepted the pope's decision to remove him from public ministry.
Asked Friday about James, a spokesman said McCarrick hadn't received formal notice of any new allegation but would follow the civil and church processes in place to investigate them.
Even now, Francis could take action to remove McCarrick from the College of Cardinals, said Kurt Martens, a canon lawyer at the Catholic University of America.
The stiffest punishment that an ordinary priest would face if such an accusation is proved would be dismissal from the clerical state, or laicization.
Information for this article was contributed by Sarah Rankin of The Associated Press.
A Section on 07/22/2018