More Clergy Abuse Is Finally Being Prosecuted, No Thanks To The Church, A Lawyer Says

Title: More Clergy Abuse Is Finally Being Prosecuted, No Thanks To The Church, A Lawyer Says

Authors & presenter: Mary Louise Kelly, Courtney Dorning & Ayen Bior

Publisher: NPR

Date: 06AUG2021

At the height of his career, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was one of the most influential leaders of the Catholic Church in the U.S., heading the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. Last week, he became the first U.S. Cardinal to be criminally charged with a sexual crime against a minor, making the 91-year-old the highest-ranking Catholic Church official in the country to face criminal charges for clergy sexual abuse.

The fact that McCarrick sexually molested adults and children was already known: A Vatican investigation confirmed the abuse. He’d been defrocked in 2019.

Mitchell Garabedian has settled more than 2,000 clergy sex abuse cases over the past 20-plus years and is the lawyer representing an abuse survivor in a current civil case against McCarrick.

“Cardinal McCarrick was one of the most powerful and influential cardinals in the world. He hobnobbed with presidents: George W. Bush, President Ford, President Carter, President Clinton,” Garabedian says. “He was very influential, very powerful, and Cardinal McCarrick right now is a defendant in a criminal case, thanks to the courage of a brave clergy sexual abuse victim.”

Late last year, the Vatican released a report detailing both abuses committed by McCarrick and how various internal church investigations into those abuses had begun and then stalled over the years.