A Massachusetts court has dropped the sexual abuse case against Theodore McCarrick, a former Roman Catholic cardinal, on the grounds that the 93-year-old was incompetent to face the trial because of dementia. The cardinal was accused of sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy in 1974.

McCarrick served as an archbishop of Washington DC. He is the only present or former US Catholic cardinal to ever be accused of child sexual abuse, and separate indictments have been brought against him by prosecutors in Massachusetts and Wisconsin.

The first case was brought before Judge Paul McCallum in Dedham, Massachusetts, and three counts of indecent assault and battery were brought against him by the prosecution in July 2022. The judge ruled, “Mr McCarrick is not competent to stand trial.”

Afterwards, the state prosecutor dropped the case against the ex-cardinal and remarked, “The commonwealth does not have a good-faith basis to proceed any longer with the prosecution given the testimony and the opinion of the psychologist that Mr McCarrick is not restorable to competency.”

Theodore McCarrick is the highest-ranking US Catholic official to be charged in the widespread crisis involving institutionalised child sex abuse in the Church. He was quiet as he watched the hearing via video conference.

A hearing in the Wisconsin case is planned for September 18. There is no scheduled trial date for the perpetrator in that case and no plea has been submitted. These two are the only cases he has encountered in spite of lawsuits filed by other men charging him with sexual abuse decades ago.

The ex-cardinal currently lives in Missouri and pleaded not guilty to the charges in September 2021. The statute of limitations in the Massachusetts case was frozen due to a legal technicality after Theodore McCarrick, a non-resident, left the state.

According to his attorneys’ motion to dismiss the case in February, a psychiatry and behavioural science professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine discovered that the ex-cardinal was suffering from dementia, which was likely brought on by Alzheimer’s disease.

The state psychologist Kerry Nelligan, who was hired by the prosecution as their own expert, testified on August 30 that she agreed his “severe cognitive declines” make him ineligible to stand trial at this time.

The Vatican overlooked his predatory behaviour

James Grein (64) has since been recognised as the anonymous minor who was sexually abused. The 1974 incident happened during his brother’s wedding celebration on the Wellesley College campus in Massachusetts. According to the police complaint, Grein said that the offender led him into a room where he grabbed his genitalia while “saying prayers.”

James Grein revealed his ordeal and mentioned that Theodore McCarrick, who went by the name “Uncle Teddy,” sexually harassed him repeatedly for years. The accusation was brought two years after he, the highest-ranking Church official to be ousted in modern times, was banished from the Catholic Church.

As the Church’s top representative in Washington at one point, McCarrick possessed considerable power. A Vatican inquiry found that he had concealed regular sexual relations with both children and adult seminarians.

The Vatican was charged with disregarding complaints against him while elevating him to ever-higher positions. His horrifying actions which continued for decades were detailed in the report. They only surfaced in 2018, twelve years after his retirement, when he lost his cardinal title. McCarrick lost his position as a priest and was dismissed from the Church a year later.

The Vatican acknowledged in a formal report from 2020 that Theodore McCarrick had received a promotion in spite of internal cautions about potential abuse. According to the report, victims who were interviewed spoke about “sexual abuse or assault, unwanted sexual activity, and intimate physical contact.”

The investigation disclosed that 17 persons provided tales of his abuse when they were still boys. They spoke of repeated incidents that started when they were just 12 years old and occasionally involved him supplying them with alcohol.

The report read, “A number of individuals reported feeling powerless to object to or resist physical or sexual advances given McCarrick’s position of authority.” The inquiry unveiled that he was close friends with former pope John Paul II and this “likely had an impact on the pope’s decision-making” to disregard the concerns and promote him to cardinal.