Originally published at The Catholic Thing
McCarrick was fiendishly masterful at dispelling allegations. In the early 1990s, he personally passed along anonymous allegations about himself to the apostolic nuncio and the FBI. No one abused as a minor came forward until 2017, under the Archdiocese of New York’s accelerated compensation program for victims. That was handled in an expedited lay-led investigation, which resulted in McCarrick being expelled from the College of Cardinals in 2018 and the priesthood in 2019. What the McCarrick case revealed was that in the 1990s any allegation against a bishop would not be entertained unless a criminal level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt was readily at hand.
