Report: Police charge McCarrick with assault in 1970s case

BOSTON - The Boston Globe reported July 29 that police in the Boston suburb of Wellesley have charged former Cardinal Theo­dore McCarrick with three counts of indecent assault and battery on a person over 14 in a criminal complaint filed by Wellesley Police in a district court in nearby Dedham, Mass.
A summons has been issued ordering McCarrick, now 91, to appear in court Aug. 26.

The Globe reported that McCarrick is now living in Missouri. The address listed for McCarrick in the court filings is the Vianney Renewal Center in Dittmer, Miss., located in Jefferson County, a suburban county of St. Louis on the eastern side of the state.

The crimes for which McCarrick is charged allegedly took place in 1974, when he was a New York archdiocesan priest and secretary to Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York.

According to the Globe, the man told investigators that McCarrick was a family friend who began molesting him when he was a boy.
According to a report by Welles­ley Police Detective Christo­pher Connelly that was filed in court with the complaint, he said McCarrick often went on trips with the then-teenager’s family and had sexually abused him in New Jersey, New York, California and Massachusetts.

In 2018, the prelate resigned from the College of Cardinals after The New York Times published a series of stories detailing abuse episodes by the then-priest and bishop during assignments in New York and New Jersey, principally in the 1970s and ’80s.

A year later, Pope Francis laicized him after a canonical process found him guilty.

Last year, the Vatican released its own report detailing the McCarrick case. It said the now-disgraced former prelate was able to rise up the Catholic hierarchical structure based on personal contacts, pro­testations of his innocence and a lack of Church officials reporting and investigating accusations made against him, according to the Vatican report on the matter.