Former cardinal Theodore McCarrick arrives outside Massachusetts’ Dedham District Courthouse for his arraignment, Sept. 3, 2021. / Andrew Bukuras/CNA
Dedham, Mass., Aug 31, 2023 / 15:30 pm (CNA).
Theodore McCarrick’s eloquence vaulted him to the upper echelons of the Catholic Church, and he stayed there, in part, by using that gift to artfully fend off whispers of sexual misconduct that threatened to knock him off his lofty perch.
Now, it’s his loss for words that appears to have spared him a prison sentence from a Massachusetts court.
In a recent psychological evaluation, McCarrick couldn’t remember the words “trial,” “necklace,” or “pacemaker,” and he drew a blank when asked for the name of the current president of the United States.
“Yes … the president … president… I see him right in front of me … I knew him when I was in Washington and he was a vice president,” he replied. “Oh, I know him; I just can’t remember his name!”
On Aug. 30, a state district court judge in the Boston suburb of Dedham dismissed criminal sex abuse charges against McCarrick, ruling that the now-93-year-old ex-cardinal, who appears frail and severely stooped in photographs, isn’t mentally competent to stand trial.
Prosecutors in the case requested the dismissal.
The ruling was based on two separate psychological evaluations, one done in December 2022 for McCarrick’s defense team and the other in June by an expert hired by prosecutors. Both assessments concluded that the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, D.C., is too cognitively impaired to actively participate in his defense.
McCarrick remains the defendant in a criminal case in Wisconsin and civil lawsuits elsewhere.
Columbia law professor Daniel Richman told CNA the Massachusetts court’s finding that McCarrick is incompetent to stand trial doesn’t bind courts in other places.
“But you could also imagine that the same factual presentation will be made to other judges in other criminal cases, and the judge there may at least notice, if not be interested in, how another judge resolved the case,” Richman said.
‘Effrontery’
McCarrick was charged in state court in Massachusetts last year with three counts of indecent assault and battery on a person over the age of 14. The charges related to allegations that he sexually abused a teenager who was a family friend at a wedding he officiated in 1974 at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
That teenager has publicly identified himself as James Grein, now 64 and originally from New Jersey.
The defense team’s expert, psychologist David Schretlen, related in his report some of the frustrations McCarrick’s lawyers have experienced in preparing his defense.
Schretlen refers to the former cardinal as “Dr. McCarrick,” an apparent reference to his doctoral degree in sociology. Because Pope Francis dismissed McCarrick from the clerical state in February 2019, the Church formally refers to him as “Mr. McCarrick.”
“His attorneys explained that Dr. McCarrick usually seems to understand their questions and follow discussions of legal matters. However, they noted that he often later asks questions that reflect a failure to either understand or remember important details of their discussions. This can occur both during (i.e., within minutes) and after (i.e., within hours to days) of a meeting,” Schretlen noted.
“He once asked to set up a meeting to discuss a matter that he was ‘excited’ to bring up, only to forget what it was when they met, nor had he written it down,” his report continued.
“On numerous occasions, Dr. McCarrick ostensibly asks questions to clarify previously discussed matters, but his questions clearly indicate that he has no memory of the previous discussions,” Schretlen reported. “At other times, he will email cryptic messages, such as the single word ‘effrontery,’ that he is unable to explain later.”
Schretlen concluded that McCarrick has a “severe cognitive disorder” and “everyday functional disability” consistent with dementia and most likely caused by Alzheimer’s disease.
‘My big problem’
The June evaluation, conducted by psychologist Kerry Nelligan, was based on six and a half hours of conversations with McCarrick at his residence at the Vianney Renewal Center, a Catholic facility in Dittmer, Missouri, run by the Servants of the Paraclete religious order.
Nelligan’s 28-page report, part of the court record, offers a window into McCarrick’s current health and mindset.
Given McCarrick’s advanced age and deteriorating condition, the document also provides what could wind up being the last public words McCarrick ever makes about the scandals that surround him.
Asked by Nelligan about his understanding of the possible evidence that could be used by the prosecution, McCarrick replied, “I can’t imagine there is anything because I’ve never done this.”
Nelligan’s report notes that McCarrick “has myriad medical issues,” including hypertension, chronic liver disease, heart failure, and atherosclerotic heart disease. He relies on a pacemaker and has suffered a series of mini-strokes, she noted.
During her conversations with McCarrick, she asked him if he had difficulties with his memory.
“Yes,” he replied. “I have trouble with words. It’s annoying. I can’t come up with the words you want.”
Asked what he had eaten for breakfast the morning of their conversation, McCarrick replied: “Oatmeal with … beans. No …. not beans. Oh, what’s the word?” When Nelligan asked if he meant raisins, he replied, “Oh, yes! Raisins!”
Another time, when she asked him to name items she was wearing or holding, McCarrick said: “You have a silver brace around your neck,” instead of using the word “necklace.” He similarly described her bracelet as a “wrist ornament.”
“Word finding is my big problem. I’m looking for a word, and I get mad because I can’t find it,” McCarrick said. “I do forget some peoples’ names, too.”
McCarrick also appeared to struggle with his awareness of time. While he could provide the month and day, he gave wildly different and incorrect answers when asked about the current year. In one instance, when Nelligan asked at a different time if he knew what the current year was, he replied: “Yes, 0256.”
A persuasive communicator
McCarrick’s command of words at the height of his power helped make and keep him an extraordinarily influential Churchman.
In 2000, when McCarrick was archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, and under investigation by the Vatican for occasionally sharing a bed with seminarians at a vacation home on the Jersey Shore owned by the archdiocese, McCarrick issued a comprehensive and apparently heartfelt denial of sexual misconduct with others.
“Your Excellency, sure I have made mistakes and may have sometimes lacked in prudence, but in the 70 years of my life, I have never had sexual relations with any person, male or female, young or old, cleric or lay, nor have I ever abused another person or treated them with disrespect,” McCarrick wrote to Pope John Paul II’s secretary, then-Bishop Stanislaw Dziwicz.
McCarrick’s letter seems to have gone right to John Paul’s heart.
“Tell McCarrick that I believe what he said and I am still a friend,” John Paul told Cardinal Angelo Sodano, his secretary of state, shortly before Sodano was to visit the United States, according to a 2020 report by the Vatican commissioned by Pope Francis.
“McCarrick’s denial was believed,” the Vatican report states, “and the view was held that, if allegations against McCarrick were made public, McCarrick would be able to refute them easily.”
Three months after McCarrick sent the letter, John Paul promoted McCarrick, appointing him archbishop of Washington. In February 2001, the pope made him a cardinal.
McCarrick served as archbishop of Washington until 2006, when he resigned at the canon-law retirement age for bishops, 75.
‘I pray a lot’
Nelligan’s report provided a measure of McCarrick’s decline since then. McCarrick has fallen from the 98th percentile in IQ to a cognitive ability worse than 92% of reasonably healthy men his age, she reported.
In McCarrick’s interview with Nelligan, he was asked how he spends his free time, McCarrick said: “I pray a lot. I read a lot of church stuff. I play bingo. I won around Easter time … five dollars.”
“He indicated that he gets along with all of the staff at his residence, ‘Very well,’” the report said. “We all work together,” McCarrick said. “There are a lot of holy people here.”
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While I support background checks and banning felons and the mentally ill from owning guns, Chicago already has very strict gun laws and they have failed miserably in curbing violence.
Did the archbishop even bother to learn this fact?
Cardinal needs to shut his mouth and mind his own business. Take the beam out of your own eye Cardinal before worrying about the mote in your neighbor’s.
I find it dispiriting that you think it’s more appropriate to castigate DiNardo for speaking out against a senseless loss of life… and that he should “mind his own business”? This is a website whose writers and users proffer almost exclusively in minding others’ business. The moment someone speaks out against gun violence, they are getting too uppity?
I urge you to think more with charity and empathy, instead of venting hate and anger as your first recourse. It’s bad for the soul.
What utter nonsense. There is no such thing as “gun violence”. The gun is a tool. Do we characterize the genocide of the 1990s in Rwanda as “machete violence”? no we do not because the tool used to commit the horrendous acts of violence is simply the material at hand. The Cardinal should pull his head out of his fourth point of contact and focus on the underlying hatred, mental distress, and the triggering causes of the act of violence. We don’t focus on the crack pipe when helping addicts heal, we focus on their mental and physical state, and those things that cause the addict to reach out for the crack pipe (or the bong, or the bottle). Its not the presence of the crack pipe that made the addict light-up, it was an mental/emotional disorder. Cardinal DiNardo’s continuance of the myth of “gun violence” is yet another entry on the scroll of reasons the laity do not trust the judgement of the “leaders” of the Catholic Church in America. They continue to prove their judgment clouded by emotion, false reasoning, and lack of focus on authentic Catholic Apostolic Teaching.
Begs the question, when was the last time that the Cardinal purchased a firearm from a federally licensed firearms dealer? Has he ever? My guess is that he has not because anyone who executes a legal purchase from a federally licensed firearm dealer is well aware of the extensive ‘reasonable’ restrictions already in place. And there are many.
Additionally Cardinal DiNardo’s calling into question how someone ‘capable of such violence was able to obtain a firearms to carry out this heinous act’ betrays a stunning naiveté on at least two fronts. First, does the Cardinal really lack imagination to such a degree that he cannot consider any number of ways both legal and illegal that the weapon was acquired? Was his question rhetorical or an irresponsible and ill-informed throw away comment indicting the legal firearms market?
Secondly, does the Cardinal not realize that we are all fallen and capable of committing evil? That someone is capable of acquiring a firearm and committing such a heinous act is a surprise to him? Really? Murders happen everyday in Chicago and only now is he surprised that people commit murder? At risk of putting too fine a point on it, on what planet does he live?