The official portal of the Holy See has devoted extensive coverage to the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Cardinal Joseph Louis Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago from 1982 to 1996.
Under a headline presenting him as a current example for the Church and the world, Vatican News publishes in full the lecture delivered by his successor, Cardinal Blase Cupich, on Friday in Fiera di Primiero, the Trentino town from which Bernardin’s parents originated, as part of events organized by the Archdiocese of Trento between October 15 and 17.
The tribute omits a detail that Theodore McCarrick himself put in writing.
When Bernardin died in November 1996, the then-Archbishop of Newark bid him farewell as a good and holy priest and confessed that with him he had lost a dear friend.
A warning among friends
The closeness between the two prelates goes beyond funeral rhetoric. Both were central figures in the progressive wing of the post-conciliar U.S. episcopate.
Bernardin, first secretary general and later president of the bishops’ conference, shaped the country’s episcopal appointments for decades, and McCarrick rose within that same ecosystem to the see of Washington and the cardinalate.
The report published by the Vatican in 2020 on McCarrick recounts a revealing episode. At the end of 1992, anonymous letters began circulating among U.S. bishops warning of an imminent scandal involving an archbishop.
When Cardinal John O’Connor asked for an explanation, McCarrick replied that Bernardin had already been kind enough to warn him about the letter from his “secret admirer.”
The Archbishop of Chicago was therefore among the first to alert the predator from Newark.
That complicity had its echo in the opposite direction.
According to the same report, McCarrick repeatedly defended Bernardin as an innocent victim of a false accusation and used that case as an example of the calumnies to which bishops were exposed.
It was the same argument he would later invoke to proclaim his own innocence before John Paul II.
Geneva Lake, April 1977
The most serious accusation against Bernardin comes from McCarrick’s best-known victim.
James Grein, who reported having been abused by the former cardinal since the age of eleven and whose testimony was decisive in his expulsion from the clerical state in 2019, stated that same year in an exclusive interview with Church Militant that Bernardin had sexually assaulted him in 1977, in a house on the shores of Geneva Lake in Wisconsin, two hours from Chicago.
According to his account, the encounter had been arranged by McCarrick, whom his family called “Uncle Ted.”
The accusation did not remain limited to an interview. In 2023 the Walworth County prosecutor’s office filed criminal charges against McCarrick for that episode.
The complaint states that the young man, then eighteen years old, was in the water by the dock when the accused and “another adult man” joined him, touched him without his consent, and commented to each other on what they were doing. It adds that McCarrick had raped him in Chicago the previous day.
In December 2023 Grein confirmed to the CNA agency that the other man was Cardinal Bernardin, who in 1977 was Archbishop of Cincinnati and president of the bishops’ conference.
The case never reached trial.
In January 2024 the court suspended proceedings after a psychologist determined that McCarrick, already in his nineties, was not fit to mount a defense, and the prosecutor’s office did not appeal. McCarrick died in April 2025 without having answered to any court.
Bernardin, who died in 1996, was never questioned about the events.
The seamless garment, with papal endorsement
None of this appears in the text disseminated by Vatican News. Cupich centers his praise on the “consistent ethic of life,” the famous seamless garment Bernardin presented at Fordham in 1983, which placed abortion, the death penalty, and the nuclear arms race on the same level.
That doctrine served for decades as a refuge for Catholic politicians who voted in favor of abortion and presented themselves as consistent thanks to their social causes.
The Archbishop of Chicago links that legacy to Leo XIV, recalling that the Pope said no one can be called a defender of life who opposes abortion and supports the death penalty.
These are the words with which the Pontiff endorsed in September 2025 Cupich’s tribute to the pro-abortion senator Dick Durbin, which InfoVaticana analyzed at the time.
Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister later recovered a 2023 speech in which then-Bishop Robert Prevost, in Chiclayo, made Bernardin’s vision his own and proposed it as a path for the Church today.
Thirty years after his death, the Holy See’s official communications organ presents as a model the prelate who bid McCarrick farewell with a friend’s tears and whom McCarrick’s principal victim places beside him in a sexual assault that reached the courts.
That it does so with the explicit backing of the reigning Pope deserves more than pious silence.