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WASHINGTON (CNS) — The Vatican has told Cardinal Theodore
E. McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington, that he can no longer
exercise any public ministry after an allegation that he abused a teenager 47 years
ago was found credible.
While maintaining his innocence, the cardinal said June 20
he had cooperated with church authorities’ investigation of the claim and that he
would obey the Vatican directive on ministry.
As people in the many places he has served — the New York
Archdiocese, the Diocese of Metuchen, New Jersey, the Archdiocese of Newark,
New Jersey, and finally the Archdiocese of Washington — absorb the news about
the high-profile churchman, many also will recall Cardinal McCarrick’s
long years of ministry in the church on the national and international levels.
Even in retirement, after decades of regularly testifying
before Congress and attending White House meetings on public policy, Cardinal
McCarrick kept abreast of a range of policy issues, domestic and international.
As a board member of Catholic Relief Services, the U.S.
bishops’ overseas relief and development agency, he continued to travel the
world and had regular speaking engagements and other activities, in the United
States and beyond.
In May 2014, he was part of a U.S. bishops’ delegation that
traveled to Iran to meet quietly with Iranian religious leaders. In November
2013, he toured areas in the Philippines that had been devastated, visiting residents
and celebrating Mass.
Then-Archbishop McCarrick was installed to head the Archdiocese
of Washington in 2001. Just three weeks later he was made a cardinal. He was
the fifth archbishop of Washington and the fourth in a row to be named a
cardinal.
As canon law requires of all bishops, the cardinal submitted
his resignation to Pope Benedict XVI when he turned 75 on July 7, 2005. However,
the pope asked the cardinal to continue heading the archdiocese. He retired in
2006 at age 76, and now-Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl was named to succeed him.
Ordained a bishop in 1977, he was an auxiliary for the New
York Archdiocese until 1981, when he was made the first bishop of the newly
formed Diocese of Metuchen. In May 1986 he was named archbishop of Newark.
He was there for 14 years. During his tenure in Newark, he
ordained 200 priests, more than any other U.S. diocese in that period.
In 1997, as a speaker in the Distinguished Lecture Series of
the U.S. State Department’s Open Forum, he called for U.S. policy at home and
abroad to focus on the poor and the vulnerable.
“We believe that we are called to put the needs of the poor
first in our national and global choices,” he said.
In 1998, he chaired and hosted a major international
conference on the ethical dimensions of international debt, co-sponsored by the
Vatican and U.S. bishops, at Seton Hall University in his archdiocese. The
conference is credited with having a significant impact on the U.S. and world
commitment to reducing the debt of heavily indebted poor countries.
He set an example of debt forgiveness in his own archdiocese
early in the jubilee year 2000 by forgiving some $10 million that parishes,
schools and church agencies owed the archdiocese.
In 2001, he was named to succeed retiring Cardinal James A.
Hickey in the nation’s capital.
He ordained 43 men in his time in the nation’s capital,
including a class of 12 that was the largest in more than 30 years.
Often in the news for his leadership in international
justice and peace issues, Cardinal McCarrick headed the U.S. bishops’
committees on migration, international policy and aid to the church in Central
and Eastern Europe.
He is a founding member of the U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom and was on the U.S. Commission for the Study of
International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development.
At a White House ceremony Dec. 6, 2000, he received the
Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights.
Born in New York July 7, 1930, Theodore Edgar McCarrick was
the only child of Theodore Egan McCarrick, a sea captain, and Margaret McLaughlin
McCarrick. Growing up in the Great Depression, he was 3 when his father died
and his grandmother moved in to help raise him while his mother worked.
He was 22 and had studied in Europe for a year-and-a-half,
learning to speak French and German, before he entered St. Joseph Seminary in
Yonkers, New York. He earned a master’s degree in history there and was
ordained a priest of the New York Archdiocese May 31, 1958.
After ordination he was assigned to The Catholic University
of America in Washington. He spent seven years there, earning a master’s degree
in social sciences and a doctorate in sociology while serving first as an
assistant chaplain and later dean of students and director of development.
From 1965 to 1969, he was president of the Pontifical Catholic
University of Puerto Rico.
He returned to New York in 1969 as archdiocesan associate
secretary for education, and the following year he became secretary to New York’s
Cardinal Terence Cooke.
On June 29, 1977, he was ordained a bishop, serving as an
auxiliary for the archdiocese.
He frequently traveled abroad to trouble spots, especially
as chairman of the bishops’ Eastern Europe and international policy committees.
Among places he had visited were Yugoslavia, Croatia,
Kosovo, Albania, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, East Timor, China,
Vietnam, Cuba, Colombia and Mexico.
Besides English, French and German, he could handle Spanish
and Italian “reasonably well” and “can understand Portuguese and a little
Polish.”
Cardinal McCarrick was a former member of the Pontifical
Council for Migrants and Travelers and the Pontifical Council for Justice and
Peace.
He was on the board of trustees of The Catholic University
of America and the boards of CRS and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the
Immaculate Conception.
In addition to the committees he headed for the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, he served or had served on the bishops’
Administrative Committee and their committees on doctrine, the laity, Latin
America, Hispanic affairs and missions.
He was a founding member and president since 1997 of the
Papal Foundation, established in the 1980s to assure the long-term solvency of
the Holy See and contribute to its activities and papal charities around the
world.
He was a member of the Synod for America in 1997 and served
on its post-synodal council.
He spent a year from January 2011 to January 2012 as a
visiting scholar at the Library of Congress, working out of an office in the
library’s historic Thomas Jefferson building.
During the yearlong post, Cardinal McCarrick looked at into
how the Amman Message has evolved and what its effects have been on the
teachings and practice of Islam. The subject fit one of his goals for
retirement: to build bridges between Catholicism and Islam.
The Amman Message is a declaration recognizing the common
principles of eight traditional schools of Islamic religious law.
Cardinal McCarrick’s interest in Islam and involvement with
relations between Christians and Muslims went back many years. In the mid-1990s, he served on the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom
Abroad and was one of the first members of the U.S. Commission for
International Religious Freedom when it was created in 1999.
He also was chairman of the Franciscan Foundation for the
Holy Land and continued to be involved in a variety of Holy Land and Middle
East peace organizations and dialogues.
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