McCarrick White Nathan Doe
Title: Thank You, Nathan Doe
Author: Father Mark White
Publisher: Father Mark White Blog
Date: 17OCT2019
This past summer, an intrepid reporter managed to interview Theodore McCarrick, in the parlor of the Kansas friary where he now resides.
What McCarrick said in the brief interview made me mad. Because I know the man. I know how he is. I know how he lies. I know how he thinks.
In the interview, McCarrick took no responsibility for all the damage he has done. He spoke in the exact same manner that I knew him to speak, back when I was one of his seminarians, when I was one of his young priests.
Nothing but Church politics.
In the interview, McCarrick dealt with the question of his own guilt in precisely the same way that he dealt with me getting expelled from the seminary in 2001. Took no interest whatsoever in: true vs. false, or the trustworthiness of Sacred Scripture, or the holy Catholic faith. He just played Church politics with my own little life.
So: Reading the interview made me hopping mad. But I didn’t write anything about it. Because I had already written McCarrick a letter, over a year earlier, begging him to repent and live in the truth.
But someone else who knows McCarrick read the same interview from this past summer, and decided to write. Not a letter to him, but a few pages for us.
“Nathan Doe” has written an essay that has restored my hope–hope that the truth will heal us. That we will–finally, eventually–get a full grip on this nightmare. And thereby find a way to bring it to an end.
Mr. Doe writes:
By the time then-Cardinal McCarrick stepped in front of the cameras and microphones in 2002 as the face of the U.S. Catholic Church’s response to the sexual abuse crisis, he had already completed a personal campaign of predatory sexual abuse of minors and young adult males that stretched back across four decades. While the national media waxed poetic about this charming and charismatic Cardinal with a twinkle in his eye, they had no idea that McCarrick was using them to send a powerful message to his countless victims that he was untouchable and in complete control. Can you really blame any of us for believing him?
Unfortunately, it would be another 16 years – and an unspeakable amount of spiritual carnage later – before McCarrick was finally stopped. In fact, the only thing that stopped him was the courage of two faithful Catholic men. Those two men did what no one else could do in 60 years.
Nathan here refers to “Mike” and Mr. James Grein. Nathan refers to himself as one of a number of “Nathans”–so called because they finally found the courage to speak the truth about a sex-abuser with power.
”He was charming. He was self-effacing. He was completely disarming. And he ran that game on everyone. He ran it on his colleagues, donors and on young boys. Everyone around this guy is just a different shade of victim.” (From a Washington Post interview with Mr. Doe.)
Indeed. Just a different shade of victim.
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