Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a prominent US cardinal who is accused of sexually abusing a teenager nearly five decades ago, the Vatican said on Saturday.
Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, was removed from the ministry last month after a review board found there was “credible” evidence that he had assaulted the teen while working as a priest in New York in the early 1970s.
“Yesterday evening the Holy Father received the letter in which Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop Emeritus of Washington, presented his resignation as a member of the College of Cardinals,” the Vatican said.
“Pope Francis accepted his resignation from the cardinalate and has ordered his suspension from the exercise of any public ministry, together with the obligation to remain in a house yet to be indicated to him, for a life of prayer and penance until the accusations made against him are examined in a regular canonical trial,” the statement said.
McCarrick, 88, has been one of the most prominent US cardinals active on the international stage and the charges make him one of the most high-profile Catholic leaders to face abuse claims.
McCarrick was ordained a priest in 1958 and rose through the ranks in the Archdiocese of New York before being installed as archbishop of Washington in 2001, a post he held until 2006.
The claims against him were made public in June by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the current archbishop of New York. Dolan said an independent forensic agency “thoroughly investigated” the allegation.
A review board that included jurists, law enforcement experts, parents, psychologists, a priest and a religious sister then “found the allegations credible and substantiated” and the Vatican ordered McCarrick to stop exercising his priestly ministry.
At the time, McCarrick released a statement maintaining his innocence, but added that he “fully cooperated” in the investigation.
Senior US church officials said they had received three allegations of McCarrick’s sexual misconduct with adults decades ago, two of which resulted in settlements.
The US Catholic Web site Crux quoted a man as accusing him of abusing him in New York’s St Patrick’s Cathedral when he was a 16-year-old in the 1970s.
McCarrick remains a priest pending the Vatican investigative process which could see him excluded from the church.
The loss of his status as cardinal is in itself the rarest of moves. The only previous such case came in 1927, when pope Pius XI accepted the resignation of French cardinal Lois Billot, who himself renounced his status for political reasons.
Other cardinals caught up in scandal include Australia’s top Catholic George Pell, No. 3 in the Vatican, who faces prosecution for historical child sexual offenses. He has pleaded not guilty.
The Archbishop of Santiago, Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, has been summoned by the regional prosecutor’s office in Rancagua, central Chile, to respond on Aug. 21 to accusations of being involved in covering up sexual abuse by Chilean priests, 14 of whom were defrocked in May.
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