Of all the testimony against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the most heartbreaking has come from a now-60-year-old man who was baptized by the abusive cleric. Known only as “James,” the New Jersey native now has a message for anyone keeping the Cardinal’s dirty secrets:
“…What is so important that you are afraid to lose? Why do you believe that you are more important than so many other lives? Why can’t you just let us all know what you know? Otherwise, all his cronies that he brought on to replace him will continue his abuse in the church.”
In his conversation with Rod Dreher of the American Conservative, James continued, “They believe that if they speak out, the Catholic Church will no longer be. They piss me off because they don’t have the guts to step up and say something.”
Meanwhile, James thinks Cardinal Kevin Farrell and other senior churchmen who have denied any knowledge of the Cardinal’s sex life are lying.
“They lie,” James told Dreher. “They lie through their teeth and hoping that everything will go away, because the great Oz behind the curtain, Cardinal McCarrick, is going to fix things again. But he’s done. He’s finally done! Somebody finally got Dolan to say what he did, and I got down on my knees and said, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough! I’m going to talk.’”
James says he was sexually abused by the Cardinal starting when he was 11, if not earlier, through his teens and into his twenties.
The boy belonged to an old-fashioned Catholic family in New Jersey. His parents were devout Catholics who valued Father McCarrick as a close family friend, and James and his six siblings all called McCarrick “Uncle Teddy.” When James was 11, he told the New York Times this July, McCarrick walked into his bedroom when he was changing out of his swimsuit.
“He said, turn around,” James reported. “And I really don’t want to, because I don’t want to show anybody anything.”
But he did, and to his shock, Father McCarrick dropped his own pants.
“See, we are the same,” James said the priest told him. “It’s O.K., we are the same.”
The story gets progressively worse and worse: McCarrick first touching the boy’s genitals when he was 13; McCarrick masturbating the boy in a beach parking lot when he was 14; McCarrick getting the boy liquored up and taking him back to his hotel room when he was 15. As the boy grew up, and as McCarrick, a talented fundraiser, climbed the Church career ladder, the abusive sexual relationship continued. James told Dreher he was present at gay sex parties in the bishop’s residence when McCarrick was Bishop of Metuchen (1981-1986).
James has told interviewers that he tried to tell his parents what was going on, but they wouldn’t hear a word against McCarrick. Meanwhile, it would seem McCarrick was quick to exploit that. James told Dreher:
“In the beach parking lot, we were late coming back, and I tried to tell my father. He told my dad that ‘this idiot shook up a coke he bought, and when he opened it, it got all over him. It ruined my car. That’s why his pants are wet.’”
“I told my dad that that’s not true. He just said, ‘You gotta go to your room.’”