This is (not) an obituary.
Disgraced former cardinal Theodore McCarrick died yesterday. He was ninety-four.
McCarrick likely needs no introduction to almost any Where Peter Is readers; nor do the reasons why it is difficult not to feel a certain schadenfreude about his demise, even after a long and unduly comfortable life. He was Bishop of Metuchen from 1981, then Archbishop of Newark from 1986, then Archbishop of Washington from 2000 until his retirement in 2006; created a cardinal in 2001, he held that honor until resigning from the College of Cardinals in 2018 when it became widely known that he was a serial sexual molester of seminarians, young priests, and at least one teenage boy. In 2019 he was laicized entirely. All of this came in the context of a broader reckoning with the pervasiveness of sexual abuse by highly-regarded clerics in the Catholic world; previously it had been possible to believe that this was limited to some dioceses or to some generations of churchmen.
McCarrick set up his downfall even as he accrued power and prestige, because his molestations overlapped in both time and space with his increasingly prominent positions as bishop, archbishop, and cardinal. His death might be a teachable moment about God’s inexhaustible mercy—God have mercy on his sin-sick soul, because nobody else will—but it feels disrespectful to his victims to look at it this way. The fact that that feels disrespectful is nobody’s fault but his own. Brought up in the grim seminary environment of Francis Spellman’s midcentury Archdiocese of New York, he nevertheless had free will and moral agency and made countless choices to become, and then continue to be, a prolific sexual predator. Yet we should pray for his soul even so—for God’s mercy on him, and for God’s justice for his victims.
McCarrick died in Dittmer, Missouri, at the mental health and addiction treatment center where he had lived since 2020.
Image: Then-Cardinal McCarrick in 2006. From Wikimedia Commons.
Nathan Turowsky is a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution. He works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.
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