By Philip Pullella, Reuters
The Vatican said on Friday that its long-awaited report into disgraced ex-U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick will be released on Tuesday.
Vatican sources told Reuters on Thursday that the report was imminent and would be released before the start of the annual meeting of American bishops Nov. 16-17
Pope Francis expelled McCarrick from the Roman Catholic priesthood last year after a Vatican investigation found him guilty of sexual crimes against minors and adults and abuse of power.
The report, which is several hundred pages long, is expected to show how McCarrick managed to rise through the ranks even though his history of sexual misconduct with adult male seminarians was an open secret.
In 2018, the pope ordered a thorough study of all documents in Holy See offices concerning McCarrick. The four U.S. dioceses where he served – New York, Metuchen, Newark, and Washington, D.C. – carried out separate investigations to feed into the Vatican report.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, said on his website that the report “could be another black-eye for the Church … but better that the story come out, in all its awful detail.”
Dolan, whose archdiocesan review board in 2018 was the first to find that allegations against McCarrick were “credible and substantiated,” said he hoped the report will “bring some measure of peace to the victim-survivors, as well as serve as a lesson on how to prevent a similar recurrence in the future”.
