Cardinal McCarrick 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, Massachusetts.
A summons has been issued ordering McCarrick, now 91, to appear at the court for arraignment August 26.
The Globe reported that McCarrick is now living in Missouri. The address listed for McCarrick in the court filings is the Vianney Renewal Centre in Dittmer, Missouri, located in Jefferson County, a suburban county of St Louis on the eastern side of the state.
The Vianney Renewal Centre is a treatment centre for Catholic clergy with sexual or other disorders.
According to its website, it’s a ministry coordinated by the Servants of the Paraclete, which collaborates with sponsoring diocesan and religious communities “to provide a safe and supportive environment for the rehabilitation and reconciliation of priests and religious brothers”.
Last year, the Jefferson County Leader, a weekly newspaper, reported the Dallas police arrested an ex-priest at the centre on charges of aggravated sexual assault of a child in North Texas that took place in 1989. The ex-priest had been laicised in 2002.
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.
Because McCarrick was not a Massachusetts resident and “the statute of limitations stopped running when he left the state,” the Globe said, “he can be charged with alleged assault dating to the 1970s”.