U.S. Cardinal Steps Down Amid Mushrooming Sex Abuse Scandal

Pope Francis on Saturday accepted the resignation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, one of the U.S. Catholic Church’s most prominent figures who has been at the centre of a widening sexual abuse scandal.

McCarrick, 88, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., is the first cardinal in living memory to lose his red hat and title. Other cardinals who have been disciplined in sexual abuse scandals kept their membership in the College of Cardinals and their honorific “your eminence”.

The allegations against McCarrick, which first surfaced publicly last month, came with Francis facing an image crisis on a second front, in Chile, where a growing abuse scandal has enveloped the Church in the Latin American country. . .

McCarrick’s sudden fall from grace stunned the American Church because he was a widely respected leader for decades and a confidant of popes and presidents. . .

Since then, another minor has come forward with allegations that McCarrick abused him when he was 11 years old, and several men have come forward to allege that McCarrick forced them to sleep with him at a beach house in New Jersey when they were adult seminarians studying for the priesthood. (Read more from “U.S. Cardinal Steps Down Amid Mushrooming Sex Abuse Scandal” HERE)

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