Rome: The Vatican’s report on ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick revealed the previously unknown contents of six anonymous letters accusing him of paedophilia that were sent to U.S. church leaders in the early 1990s and later forwarded to the Holy See.
The 449-page report also included testimony from a woman identified only as “Mother 1” who told Vatican investigators she, too, tried to raise the alarm with anonymous letters in the 1980s when McCarrick was a bishop in Metuchen, New Jersey after she saw McCarrick “massaging (her sons') inner thighs” at her home.
The woman said she sent the letters to members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy “expressing her distress about McCarrick’s conduct with minors,” and she believed they “may have been thrown aside” because they were anonymous.
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Jeff Anderson, an attorney for several of McCarrick’s accusers, said at a news conference Tuesday that he also represents two people in the woman's family and criticized the church for turning a blind eye to the warning.
There is “no evidence in this report or anyplace else that that account, that warning, that detailed, courageous effort by that mom in approximately 1984 was even investigated," Anderson said. "Nobody looked. Nobody asked.”
The other anonymous letters, which were sent in 1992-1993, were addressed to top U.S. church leaders, the bishops conference and the Vatican's ambassador to the U.S., who reported that he had destroyed them upon receipt.
The Vatican has long ignored anonymous abuse reports, insisting on receiving signed complaints before initiating any investigation. And the U.S. bishops conference had a policy forbidding the use of anonymous allegations as the basis to start abuse investigations while requiring the information be passed onto the accused prelate.
The Vatican has now changed that policy for the universal church: According to a new manual issued earlier this year, anonymous reports can be used to justify opening a probe.
AP
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