ANALYSIS: McCarrick’s Victim to Silent Enablers: ‘What is so Important That You Are Afraid to Lose?’

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By Dorothy Cummings McLean, LifeSiteNews, July 26, 2018

Dorothy Cummings McLean

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.’”

When James tried to tell his mother, he said, she told him that he must be mistaken.

‘They woo you in to trust them’

James described to Dreher the way in which he and other boys and young men have been groomed by their abusers.

“What they do is they lure you in with presents and booze, and they promise you everything, give you nothing, and then take everything,” James says. “They woo you in to trust them. And then they start abusing you. They start making you do things that you don’t want to do because you’re afraid. Fear takes over.”

James was afraid both that no one would believe him and that he was doing something wrong. In what can only be described as the most egregious spiritual abuse, McCarrick bragged of his power as a priest: “He would always tell me that I was his special boy, that God gave me to him, so we could worship together and be happy together. He told me he had the power to get God to forgive me all my sins. That my father didn’t have that power. That’s the aura.”

Carrick also apparently taught the boy that he was his direct contact with God.

“He told me that hundreds and hundreds of times,” James said to Dreher. “God will only listen to you when you are with me.”

James’ family believed he was McCarrick’s special boy because he had been the first baby McCarrick ever baptized. The bonds between the family and the priest remained strong. As a bishop, McCarrick presided at all the siblings’ weddings, including James’s. But James’s marriage lasted only 17 months.

By then James had a serious problem with drugs and alcohol. At 33, he tried to kill himself with an overdose of painkillers and gin. Surviving, he gave up drugs and alcohol – and, after a subsequent relationship with another abusive priest, he also gave up his Catholic faith.

“There are a lot of gay priests in the Church,” James told Dreher, “and I said this is not for me.”

Cardinal McCarrick is only one of several bishops and senior churchmen who have been removed from active ministry after allegations of homosexual abuse or misconduct. Others have included Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa, California (1999); Juliusz Paetz of Poznan, Poland (2002); Juan Carlos Maccarone of Santiago del Estero, Argentina (2005); Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionnaires of Christ (2006); Georg Müller of Trondheim and Oslo in Norway (2009); Raymond John Lahey of Antigonish in Canada (2009); Roger Vangheluwe of Brughia, Belgium (2010); John C. Favalora of Miami (2010); Anthony J. O’Connell of Palm Beach, Florida (2010); and Cardinal Keith O’Brien of Edinburgh, Scotland (2013).


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