A major Cardinal of the Catholic Church, Theodore McCarrick, has been accused of being a homosexual who abused boys:
This has been a very long time coming:
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Archbishop Emeritus of Washington, D.C., has been removed from public ministry after a credible allegation he abused a teen 50 years ago while serving as a priest in New York Archdiocese.
More:
Innocence? I believe McCarrick is lying, and that he knows he is lying. I have been waiting for this story to break since 2002.
Back then, I received a tip from a priest who had gone on his own dime to Rome, along with a group of prominent US Catholic laymen, to meet with an official for the Roman Curial congregation that names bishops. It had been rumored at the time that Theodore McCarrick, the Archbishop of Newark, was going to be moved to Washington, DC, and to be made a cardinal. This group traveled to Rome to warn the Vatican that McCarrick was a sexual harrasser of seminarians. The story this priest shared with me was that McCarrick had a habit of compelling seminarians to share his bed for cuddling. These allegations did not involve sexual molestation, but were clearly about unwanted sexual harassment. To refuse the archbishop’s bedtime entreaties would be to risk your future as a priest, I was told.
Rome was informed by these laymen — whose number included professionally distinguished Catholics in a position to understand the kind of harm this would cause –that McCarrick was sexually exploiting these seminarians, but it did no good. McCarrick received his appointment to the Washington archdiocese in 2000.
In early 2002, though, the priest who tipped me off wouldn’t go on the record. It would have meant the end of his priesthood, quite possibly. He gave me the name of a couple of medical figures who had been on the same journey. I called one, who confirmed it, but wouldn’t go on the record. I called the other, who gasped when I said it out loud, and who said, “If that were true, then I wouldn’t confirm it for the same reason Noah’s sons covered their father in his drunkenness.”
That’s where the investigation stood after a couple of days. For all I knew, these were only allegations. Then a personal friend of McCarrick’s — a closeted gay man, someone whose name you would know — contacted the news organization for which I was working on this story. The caller did so on McCarrick’s behalf, trying to get me pulled off the story. I won’t go into details, but the man who made the call conceded that McCarrick was guilty, but insisted that no laws had been broken, and therefore it wasn’t a big deal. My supervisor on the story, to his great credit, simply said to keep digging, but to keep him informed.
How did McCarrick find out? It turned out that the priest who tipped me off had only told his spiritual adviser, a well-known conservative cleric, who had almost certainly called McCarrick. My informant — remember, this was early 2002 — was still under the naive impression that you could tell the good guys from the bad guys in the Catholic scandal based on where they lined up theologically. Not true!
I never wrote the story about McCarrick, because I could not get anybody to go on the record. That spring, I fielded more than a few calls from Catholic priests from the New Jersey area who had direct personal knowledge of McCarrick’s sexual derring-do with seminarians. They would phone me, tell me what they knew, and then beg me to “do something”! I would tell them that I could do nothing until and unless they provided documents, and/or were willing to put their name to public accusations.
Nobody could or would do that. Whenever I would see Cardinal McCarrick on television that spring, wringing his hands about how terrible the abuse scandal was, and how the hierarchy really had no idea how extensive the crisis was, yadda yadda, I knew that I was looking at a world-class liar and hypocrite. Moreover, I knew for a fact that the Vatican had been warned about “Uncle Ted” before moving him to Washington, and that those warnings had meant nothing, because hey, Uncle Ted was well connected, and he was a champion fundraiser for the Church.
Let me make this clear: The Vatican had been warned in person, by credible Catholic laymen, and a Catholic priest in a position to know, that as Archbishop of Newark, Theodore McCarrick would compel seminarians under his authority to get in bed with him and cuddle him. These laymen traveled to Rome at their own expense to warn the Vatican about this man’s sickness. But Pope St. John Paul II, who I assume was not told of the allegations, made him a cardinal archbishop anyway.
Believe me, this single incident from the life of Uncle Ted, fifty years ago, is not the only one. I hope and pray to God that Theodore McCarrick is about to have his #MeToo moment. There are more, many more, stories to be told about Uncle Ted and his “ministry” to young men under his authority in the Church. I am grateful that they will now be coming out while he is still around to face some kind of justice, if only in the court of public opinion.
And there’s this: that Cardinal McCarrick was a sexual predator of some sort was the worst-kept secret among the East Coast media covering the church abuse scandal. Even though the McCarrick allegations, if true, clearly reflected deep moral corruption in a leading American Catholic figure, and were at the very least a matter of a man of great power within an organization using that power to compel those under him within the organization to satisfy his sexual desires. I wanted to pursue the story more deeply, and had an editor who was willing to let me do so, but I did not have the resources at the time to do the deep digging that was necessary. To the best of my knowledge, those journalists who did have the resources turned a blind eye to it. I do not know the reason, but I have my theories.
I do know this much: in 2012, one reporter I know personally nailed the McCarrick story, with on-the-record interviews and having dug up court papers. The major magazine for which he was doing the story killed it at the last minute. To this day he does not know why. Again, I have an idea, but it is only speculation. I do know from my extensive, detailed conversations with this journalist, as well as from my own conversations with sources in 2002, that there is a lot more on this story yet to come out — that is, if reporters and editors are interested in making sure Cardinal McCarrick has his #MeToo moment.
If.
A word for all you Catholic priests and laymen who contacted me 16 years ago about Cardinal McCarrick, and told me what you knew, but who would not go on the record about it — it is time for you to find your voice. Speak up. Tell what you know. The young men who had to suffer this pervert’s attentions all these decades deserve to have their pain acknowledged and vindicated.
I would like to tell the story of three friends. The first I will call Kevin, the second one I will call David, and the third one I will call William (not their real names).
Kevin is a lawyer who was and remains highly active in local Republican politics. He is a “conservative” but also very Catholic and, as he knows, his career will probably remain on a local level because while a Republican, he will not accept the promotion of the LGBT in his party. For some years before he got married and had a family, he worked in Washington for a respectable newspaper with a long history. He did not earn a lot of money and was not particularly prestigious at all. However, during his time he discovered circumstantial evidence that amounted to an entire list of Catholic bishops and priests who are either homosexuals or involved in the homosexual abuse of children.
Remember- the John Jay Study of 2004, which audited the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse cases- found that 81% of all the cases of sexual abuses of minors were homosexual as opposed to heterosexual.
Kevin went to his editor and tried to pursue the stories but was unable to expose the corruption because nobody wanted to go on record to talk about what happened.
I spoke with Kevin recently, and he said that he was glad that the McCarrick scandal came out, because McCarrick was one of the people he had circumstantial evidence against but for whom nobody would speak about.
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David is an older man and a good friend. He is not very attractive in either his face or his body, but has a conscience of gold, having come from an established family in the American Cosa Nostra and rejected it all because he did not believe in the crimes they committed and he was dedicated to his Catholic Faith. He never had children and about ten years ago married a widow and so counts her children as his own. He would also say that he has many other children because he worked in youth ministry for decades and befriended many people that he has since remained friends with into adulthood.
David was also one of the first people in the northeast to expose the sexual abuse that was taking place which would later be exposed by the Boston Globe and Hartford Courant as part of the sexual abuse crisis.
David said there was a network of priests and even bishops in the dioceses scattered throughout New England and New York that were involved in the systematic sexual abuse of children and teenagers. Because he worked in youth ministry, he said that he first became aware of the abuse in the 1980s and slowly it was revealed to him from these teenagers that the abuse was not at home, but was by members of the clergy.
He originally reported it to the Archdiocese of Hartford. The responses he received were delays, denials, and eventually outright threats to stop talking or he would be completely blacklisted. He was harassed and continued to receive threats. Believing that things would not improve, he went directly to the Archbishop with evidence and told him what happened.
The Archbishop was in shock at what David told him, and he resolved to investigate and deal with the situation. The Archbishop had gone into the hospital several days after, but he called David from the hospital and said that after a small surgery he would deal with the matter.
The Archbishop, John F. Whealon, never came out of surgery. He died on the operating table of St. Francis’ Catholic Hospital following complications over “switching” his medicine:
Archbishop John F. Whealon, who went into cardiac arrest and died at the end of routine surgery Friday morning, had suffered from high blood pressure since 1965 and had switched medications he took to keep it under control during his hospital stay last week.
“He had been under treatment for hypertension since 1965,” said Peter Mobilia, spokesman for St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, Saturday.
“Hypertension is the first indication of possible arteriosclerosis,” or hardening of the arteries, Mobilia said. Whealon’s cancer treatment had to be “modulated” because of the treatment for high blood pressure, he said.
The 70-year-old prelate, who had battled cancer since 1978, had “significant and long-standing heart disease, which predisposed the archbishop” to the cardiac dysrhythmia he suffered Friday, said Dr. George H. Barrows, director of pathology at St. Francis Hospital, who performed the autopsy Friday.
Barrows found a progressive narrowing of the blood vessels that supply the heart and enlarged heart muscle, a common symptom of hypertension. But the extent of damage to the heart’s blood vessels “probably would not” have shown up in tests, Barrows said. “An EKG or blood tests would have been normal,” he said.
Despite his health problems, Whealon’s death was a shock. The surgery was minor, and he was to be released from the hospital by noon Friday. His secretary, the Rev. Thomas Barry, had taken the archbishop’s bags to the car.
Whealon was admitted to the hospital July 27 after fainting during Mass at St. Mary’s Church in Windsor Locks. But doctors said the collapse was not serious and planned to discharge him after the routine surgery was completed.
When he collapsed, Whealon was taking Lopressor, a beta blocker, which reduces blood pressure by cutting the rate and force of the work performed by the heart, Mobilia said. The drug, combined with stomach cramps, caused the fainting spell, which doctors described as “an unusual reflex response, known as a vasovagal reaction.” During his hospital stay, his medication was switched to Digoxin, a cardiac muscle agent that makes the heart work more efficiently by strengthening its pumping power, and Cardizem, a medication to relieve high blood pressure, he said.
The archbishop died during surgery Friday to replace a plastic catheter, called a stent, between the right kidney and bladder. He was under general anesthesia during the surgery.
Dr. Brendan M. Fox, senior urologist at St. Francis Hospital, said the risks of the minor surgery were thought to be “quite acceptable.” He said Whealon had had “some irregularity of heartbeat, which was not life threatening.”
The autopsy also showed a recurrence of leiomyosarcoma, a type of muscular tumor cancer that Whealon had undergone surgery for five times, Barrows said.
He had several nodules, 4 to 6 centimeters in size, growing on the smooth muscle of the pelvic region, near his bladder and kidney,” he said. Samples showed the recurrence was more aggressive, but treatment would have been unlikely.
“Generally, after initial surgeries, no further [surgeries] are done,” he said.
The most extensive surgery took place in February 1984, when surgeons removed much of Whealon’s lower intestine. Whealon underwent surgery again Dec. 20, 1988, when more malignant tumors were removed. That was followed by several months of chemotherapy. A second course of radiation or chemotherapy is not usually effective for his type of cancer, Barrows said. “The archbishop was in very good condition,” Barrows said. “He led a vigorous and healthy life. … This could have happened at any time.” The heart problems occurred at the end of surgery, when Whealon was about to be transferred to a stretcher to be wheeled to recovery.
“The state-of-the-art monitors were still hooked up, physicians were still in the room, watching the monitors, looking after him very carefully,” Barrows said. “Everything you could hope for to happen.” An hourlong effort to revive Whealon failed. (source)
Not even a day after his death, David received a call from the Diocese. Per the direct order of the temporary replacement to Whealon, David was blacklisted in all dioceses throughout New England, barring him from working in any capacity in any parish. There was one exception- the Archdiocese of Norwich, CT. This was because one of the few priests who did not either oppose or refuse to help him (and still is a priest today) was close to the Bishop for the Norwich Diocese, and he was able to convince him to let David continue to work although did not pursue the investigation about the abuse.
When the sexual abuse crisis exploded in 2002, David said that he wondered when it was going to happen and that he was glad it was taking place because it was overdue for it to be revealed.
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William is a man who lives somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. He has reported to me from the authority of a priest, who I also know is a reputable source, that in the particular diocese where that priest is, a minimum of 50% of the priests are homosexuals. This is also not a “major” diocese either. According to this same priest, this particular diocese is “not that bad” because in some dioceses, the numbers are 75% or higher .
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Do not forget also, that Theodore Shoebat himself was assaulted by a priest, Msgr. Yarbrough, and he later confronted him about his actions, Msgr. Yarbrough. You can read Ted’s entire account here.
Ted confronting Msgr. Yarbrough
Msgr. Yarbrough, who has been accused of molesting a young man, Hector Escalante, also is a major contributor to advancing the LGBT in Latin America, having been named a consultant for the book Queering the Public, Sexual Rights In Brazil And Mexico.
There are good and bad people no matter where one goes. As a fact, it is also true that the Catholic Church has the lowest rates of sexual abuse when compared on a per-denomination and even religion basis, which is something that even major Protestant figures admit.
The Catholic Church does not have a “clerical sexual abuse” problem. It has a problems with homosexuals into infiltrating the ranks of the priesthood and then using their position to abuse people in the name of religion.
There is also other forms of sexual abuse- heterosexual and lesbian- that takes place. They must also be identified. However, in the supermajority of cases, when one speaks of “sexual abuse” and Catholic priests, one can guess 81 out of 100 times correctly that is it homosexual.
Many Catholics will not know a lot about what happens. But enough people know something or MAY suspect something.
Years ago, Shoebat.org initiated Operation Whip, which is an effort aimed at exposing and turning over through the proper channels those who are involved in homosexuality or child abuse in the Catholic Church, because one must start by cleaning one’s own house.
There is an infestation of perverts in the Church who are abusing their authority for their selfish ends. We at Shoebat.org are committed to seeing that, for the good of the Faithful and the Faith, they can no longer hide.
If you have evidence of sexual abuse in the Church, please contact us so we can investigate and confront the issue. We respect your privacy.