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Pope Francis has defrocked former U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick after Vatican officials found him guilty of soliciting for sex while hearing confession & of sexual crimes vs minors & adults. He is 1st churchman who reached rank of cardinal to be defrocked in sex abuse scandals
McCarrick had served as the archbishop of Washington, spent years in New Jersey dioceses and had been an influential fundraiser for the church. “It apparently was an open secret in some church circles that he slept with adult seminarians.”
McCarrick’s punishment “was announced five days before Francis leads an extraordinary gathering of bishops from around the world to help the church grapple with the crisis of sex abuse by clergy and the systematic cover-ups by church hierarchy.”
“Despite the apparent common knowledge in church circles of his sexual behavior, McCarrick rose to the heights of church power. He even acted as the spokesman for U.S. bishops when they enacted a “zero tolerance” policy against sexually abusive priests in 2002.”
“Francis himself became implicated in the decade-long McCarrick cover-up after a former Vatican ambassador to the U.S. accused the pope of rehabilitating the cardinal from sanctions imposed by Pope Benedict XVI despite being told of his penchant for young men.”
Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org, an advocate for church accountability in the sex abuse crisis demanded that Francis “tell the truth about what he knew and when he knew it” about McCarrick.
“In a statement, she said of the 101 accused bishops her group has tracked, McCarrick is only the seventh to be laicized )as the process of being defrocked is called). She said the other 94 either still hold the title of bishop or did so until they died.”
Vatican watchers have compared the McCarrick cover-up scandal to that of the Rev. Marcial Maciel, perhaps the 20th-century Catholic Church’s most notorious pedophile. Like Maciel, McCarrick was a powerful, popular prelate who funneled millions in donations to the Vatican. 
