The calendar now at GetReligion — like any cyber-workplace — starts getting complicated as we move through Advent and into the entire whirlwind of Hanukkah, Christmas, New Years Day, etc. That’s even true during a pandemic that has prevented us( peculiarly older folks like me) locked up.
Still, Julia Duin is out and about the coming week. However I received an interesting “other side of the notebook” piece that I knew would interest her. It was linked to the Vatican’s long-delay report about the descend of former cardinal Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick and why that fib — shrouded in rumors for decades — was so hard for numerous journalists to cover.
The brand-new case — “My minor role in divulge McCarrick” — was written by Catholic scribe Matt C. Abbott and ran at RenewAmerica.com.
I requested Julia for a immediate comment on the piece and she wrote back: “Matt clearly was one of the early people to seem the alarm but like the rest of us, he had only hearsay to go on. Not that said hearsay wasn’t convincing. A number of us had heard about rumors for years and Matt connected the dots quicker than a lot of us[ in mainstream newsrooms] who were more constrained toward having to get actual on-the-record people demonstrate those rumors. As an independent, he could say what he demanded at the time.”
To grasp the context for Abbott’s brand-new observations, it helps to flash back to Julia’s earlier GetReligion uprights about the new challenges columnists faced dragging this sordid story out into the light of day. Those were 😛 TAGEND
* “The scandal of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and why no major media outed him.”
* “Cardinal Ted McCarrick, Part II: The New York Times takes a stab at this old story.”
* “How correspondents can nail down the rest of the Cardinal McCarrick story — for good.”
The story of the reporting of this story is unbelievably involved and there are many directions and sources that remains not out in the open.
The best room to residence Abbott’s new slouse in situation is to read a long, long moving drawn from the first of those three Duin announces. There’s no way to edit this down — because reality was complicated. Period. She starts with the fact that several correspondents knew that there had been behind-the-scenes legal/ business colonizations with victims, but no one could confirm how many or pin down key details 😛 TAGEND
Numerous writers — and Catholics — knew that McCarrick has been accused of this sort of thing for decades and that he fostered male seminarians for sexual determinations for years . … It is one of the great untold narrations of the belief beat.
Look at this paper announced in 2010 by Richard Sipe, a former priest who has been a psychotherapist specializing in sexual abuse actions by Catholic clergy.
Yep, eight years ago. It is an R-rated account of McCarrick’s lesbian antics. One sordid incident- described in a four-page document- involved McCarrick and three other preachers and their sex toy during a time 1987 tour to a fish camp in New York. It accords the legal documents I was cause. Please read it.
It wasn’t Sipe who gave me the documents, but somebody else. Those documents involved Gregory Littleton, a seminarian who later became a priest in the Diocese of Metuchen, N.J ., a diocese that McCarrick headed in the early 1980 s. In 1993, Littleton got implicated in some sexual acting out with two teen-aged boys; he underwent several years of counseling, then get sent to the Diocese of Charlotte, N.C ., in 1997 where, as far as I know, he was performing just fine until the gender ill-treatment crisis hit the U.S. Catholic Church in 2002.
Then, a brand-new bishop of the Metuchen diocese re-examine Littleton’s file and send his information south. By this time , no diocese could yield to have a priest on staff who had abused anyone for any reason, so in 2004, Littleton was removed. All this came out in a press statement from the Charlotte officials. “My own life was left in mental, psychological and financial ruins, ” he wrote in a plaintive mention to McCarrick( now a cardinal in Washington, D.C .) in 2005. “I was made a promise by the Diocese of Metuchen that I would be cared for.”
It was Littleton’s file that I was handed down 2008. On page after sheet, Littleton tells how he told bishops, other priests, counselors and whoever else would listen about McCarrick and that many of his sexual problems dated back to this prelate. Littleton is the writer of the memo about the fish camp.
But no one dared to go against such a potent temperament. I shielded the election of Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005 in Rome and McCarrick was the darling of the American press there. Who would believe the words of a disgraced clergyman?
But word was beginning to seep out.
In December 2005, Catholic journalist Matt Abbott wrote a pillar about McCarrick’s invitations to seminarians to join him for weekends at his sea house in Sea Girt, N.J.
That makes us that Abbott commentary the other day, in which he dug into the Vatican report( click here for. pdf ) and looked for confirmation of what Catholic officials would put in ink — along with the topics they continue to, well, leave in the closet.
To my pleasant surprise, my figure and tower referred in the Vatican’s recently-released 449 -page report on humiliation onetime cardinal Theodore McCarrick. See pages 234 to 244 and 280 to 283 . …
The information I wrote about starting in 2005 pertained to McCarrick’s coercively sharing a bed with seminarians he favored, which constituted an abuse of power. It was, I came to find out, an “open secret” among several people in the Church and in the mainstream media. Yet it wasn’t until the Archdiocese of New York in 2017 deemed as plausible and substantiated an accusation made against McCarrick of the sexual abuse of a minor that the dominoes began to fall, so to speak.
It was only then that we began to see tales about McCarrick’s corruption. It was only then that the mainstream media began to turn on him.
If you have been following this story, you need to read all of this patch. And what about reporters?
Abbott ardors a parting shot over the bow, so to speak, of columnists and religiou officials who are still being little than honest about controversial issues linked to this scandal.
The bottom line: This was a close call. McCarrick almost got away.
The unnerving design, if you will, is if the male victim had been only a couple of years older at the time the abusive happen has just taken place, McCarrick would likely still be a prelate in good standing in the Church. The dominoes probably would not have begun to fall. Instead, the meeting have had an opportunity to saw consensual and effectively swept under the rug, as had passed with McCarrick’s sexual harassment of seminarians years ago.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen this time.
So what shoe hasn’t lowered?
I’ve had positive communication with reporters employed by mainstream media shops, but I will express my disappointment that the mainstream media frequently seek to avoid the subject of a lesbian subculture in the priesthood working to undermine authentic Catholic teaching and rehearsal. And if a Catholic writer focuses too much on the operations of the this subculture, which are often done under the radar, he or she gets written off as a right-wing kook and effectively “canceled.”
It’s not catching, nonetheless, considering the vast majority of secular journalists, and even some Catholic columnists, don’t agree with the Church’s teaching on homosexuality as presented in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.( Heck, I think it’s safe to say that a significant number of clergy disagree with the teaching as well .)
That’s just how it is.
Read it all.It isn’t time to close the “Uncle Ted” files.
MAIN IMAGE: Graphic from ComplicitClergy.com website.
Read more: getreligion.org
Recent Comments