His spectacular downfall, amid a welter of accusations of sexual misconduct, which resulted in him being deprived of his Cardinal’s hat, marked his career out as one that illustrated not just the strengths but also the spectacular weaknesses of American Catholicism.
To many, faithful or not, the career of McCarrick was indicative of a Church leadership that had lost its way.
Born in New York on July 7 1930, the only child of Theodore McCarrick and his wife, Margaret, née McLaughlin, Theodore Egan McCarrick – Ted, as he was always known – had the misfortune to lose his father aged three.
His widowed mother became a factory worker in the Bronx. She and her son lived in Washington Heights, and were supported by a large network of relations and friends. McCarrick was an altar boy at his local parish church, and attended his local Catholic school, later going on to Fordham Prep, a Jesuit-run secondary school.
On leaving school, thanks to the kindness of a benefactor, whose identity remains a mystery, he studied in Europe for a year and a half before returning to Fordham University, his mind already made up to study for the priesthood. He entered St Joseph’s Seminary, Yonkers, and was ordained by the flamboyant Cardinal Spellman (famous for his extravagant lifestyle and his friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy) on May 31 1958 in New York.
Further studies followed in social sciences, culminating in a PhD in sociology from the Catholic University of America in Washington.
In 1965, while still in his mid-thirties, McCarrick was appointed president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. After four years, having made a success of the university, Monsignor McCarrick (as he then was) was recalled by Cardinal Cooke to New York, first to work in the archdiocese’s education department, then to be his private secretary.
Thanks to Cooke’s patronage, McCarrick’s promotion was rapid. In 1977 he became an auxiliary bishop in New York. In 1981 he was appointed the first Bishop of Metuchen, a newly established diocese in New Jersey.
In 1986 he became Archbishop of Newark and in 2001 he was installed as Archbishop of Washington, and later created a cardinal. He served in Washington for five years before reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75 in 2006.
In his 30 years as a bishop, and long after his retirement, McCarrick was an indispensable figure in American Catholicism. In 1986, and again in 1992, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops elected him to head its Committee on Migration. In 1992, he also was appointed to head the Committee for Aid to the Church in Central and Eastern Europe.
In 1996 he became chairman of the Committee on International Policy, and in 2001 as chairman of the Domestic Policy Committee. He also served on committees dedicated to administration, doctrine, the laity, Latin America and the missions.
All of this made McCarrick a spokesman for the Church on fashionable matters and their link man with the administration in Washington. When George W Bush arrived in the city as president, he and his wife’s first private dinner engagement outside the White House was with McCarrick.
McCarrick was also a founding member of the Papal Foundation, and served as its president. This body, composed of bishops and rich laypeople, was designed to raise money for Papal initiatives, and its spectacular success won the Cardinal great respect in Rome, a place traditionally suspicious of “Anglo-Saxon” clerics.
McCarrick became a frequent visitor to the Vatican, serving on the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples, the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See.
Having made human rights advocacy one of his major interests, McCarrick became an indefatigable traveller, visiting China, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Rwanda and Burundi, as well as many countries in Eastern Europe and Central America, often on behalf of the Vatican.
In November 1996 he joined the US Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad, and from 1999-2001 he was a member of the US Commission for International Religious Freedom. In December 2000 President Clinton gave him the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights.
Under his guidance, the Archdiocese of Washington undertook a major fundraising campaign, Forward in Faith, between 2003 and 2005. The campaign, whose funds were earmarked to support education, vocations, parish and social services, resulted in $185 million in pledges, or $50 million more than the $135 million goal.
Forward in Faith was one of the most successful capital campaigns in US diocesan history.
McCarrick, in a Church which constantly talked of the option for the poor, was clearly the man with the Midas touch.
Unusually for an American, Cardinal McCarrick spoke five languages, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. He took part in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI as the successor to Pope John Paul II in April 2005.
He was too old to take part in the conclave that elected Pope Francis in March 2013, being over 80, but took part in the preparatory meetings, at which he was thought to have exercised considerable influence in favour of the election of Cardinal Bergoglio.
Several of the men later promoted by Pope Francis were well known protégés of McCarrick.
And yet throughout this glittering ecclesiastical career, it was well-known to many that McCarrick was a predatory homosexual with a penchant for handsome seminarians, in which he took a more than paternal interest. There was widespread gossip about what went on at his beach house, where seminarians would be invited to stay the night, and where there were never enough beds to go round, meaning one would always have to share a bed with McCarrick.
But no one was ever prepared to go on record and denounce McCarrick. A concerned group of Catholics had tried to prevent his appointment to Washington, and travelled to Rome to do so, but their concerns were brushed aside on the grounds that there was no proof of misbehaviour.
It was only in 2018, after McCarrick had long retired, that the floodgates of accusations opened. It was alleged that some five decades previously, while secretary to Cardinal Cooke, he had groped an altar boy who was being fitted for a cassock.
At the same time, the dioceses of Metuchen and Newark admitted that they had made financial settlements to two former seminarians who had suffered McCarrick’s attentions decades previously. In the wake of this came explosive allegations that McCarrick had abused a man, a close family friend, for more than 20 years, starting when he was 11.
The Vatican acted first by suspending McCarrick from priestly ministry, and then by accepting his resignation as a cardinal (an almost unprecedented move), and sentencing him to a life of prayer and penance, as well as close confinement in a house of their choosing until such a time as a canonical trial could take place.
In the meantime, one of America’s most popular and feted clerics became the object of growing condemnation, stripped of various honorary degrees and reviled by all, while his former friends maintained a strict silence.
Various Catholic bishops, including one who had shared a flat with the fallen Cardinal, declared that they had known nothing about his double life – something many found hard to believe.
In person McCarrick had great charm, and as a celebrity priest he had been a friend of Bing Crosby and the Hearst family, among other famous American Catholics, all of whom were generous towards the causes for which he was raising funds. The seminarians he favoured were encouraged to call him Uncle Ted, and were frequent recipients of friendly, often affectionate, letters.
In dress, McCarrick was rather shabby, and in demeanour he always affected to be a man of simple piety who never forgot his working class background and his deprived childhood. Many took this persona at face value.
Yet he was also a man of enormous ambition, a skilled politician and shrewd manipulator. He took great pains to be as close as possible to Pope (now Saint) John Paul II, being, as one clerical observer put it, “a genius at schmoozing”. It was this cultivation of the powerful that perhaps guaranteed his immunity from scrutiny and his continued high profile, even in retirement, for so long.
Theodore McCarrick, born July 7 1930, died April 3 2025