McCarrick’s Brazen Behavior: Vatican’s Report Underscores How He Hid His Abuses in Plain Sight

National Catholic Register, 19 November 2020

McCarrick never attempted to slink around in the shadows, lest he appear to have something to hide. He was more devilishly clever than that.

Who was the first person to forward written accusations about Theodore McCarrick to the police? Who was the first to pass them on to the apostolic nuncio?

The McCarrick Report gives us this shocking and very illuminating answer: McCarrick himself. And that is the principal explanation why “Uncle Ted” — right down to that very name — got away with so much for so long. He was so brazen in his behavior that it neutralized the reactions of so many.

Most attention to the McCarrick Report has focused on how ecclesial governance and clerical culture systematically failed to stop McCarrick’s rise. That is understandable, given that McCarrick himself has been defrocked and has disappeared from public view. While the attention focuses on who knew what when, some additional attention is merited to how McCarrick — the principal villain — did it. Without Ted McCarrick, after all, there is no McCarrick Report. 

How did he do it? McCarrick never attempted to slink around in the shadows, lest he appear to have something to hide. He was more devilishly clever than that, figuring out that the best place to hide was in plain sight. 

He groomed boys — though that term was not used in the 1970s — in front of their parents. The report includes the testimony of one mother who wrote anonymous letters to various prelates in the 1980s. (No records, originals or copies, of those letters were found.) She relates an incident in which McCarrick, sitting on the couch between her two sons, was massaging their inner thighs. This took place directly across the living room from her husband, who noticed nothing awry. McCarrick counted on just that dynamic. If “Uncle Ted” was being Uncle Ted in front of everyone and in plain sight, how could anything be really wrong?

About that “Uncle Ted.” It was not a private, confidential moniker, meant to throw a veil of secrecy over everything. McCarrick broadcast it far and wide, even hosting annual “Uncle Days” in his dioceses for all his “nephews.” If “Uncle Ted” was an official entry on the archdiocesan calendar, it had to be on the up-and-up, no?

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