Ordained By Theodore McCarrick
Title: Second Part of Chapter II Draft
Ordained by a Predator, Chapter II, “What I Think Happened with McCarrick,” part 2. [Part 1 of Chapter II is here.; Chapter I is here.]
Some of McCarrick’s victims had complained. McCarrick’s successor in Metuchen heard from at least one, a wronged seminarian. The young man eventually put it in writing. Professors at Seton Hall also heard complaints. A Trenton bishop apparently reported what he had heard to Nuncio Cacciavillan; someone from the nunciature then showed up in Newark to insist that the beach-house trips stop. They did not.
McCarrick apparently made half-hearted promises about reforming his ways. Decades later, he admitted to a Vatican official that he had slept in the same bed as some of his seminarians, but he excused himself on the pretense that he thought of it as a “family” arrangement. To this day, McCarrick seems not to have admitted to himself the staggering extent of the damage he has wrought. He does not recognize the monster that stares back at him in the mirror, the abuser of power who violated the holy dignity of more men and boys than he can even remember. He still believes his own lies, his own mythology about how much good he has done for his “nephews.”