Maximum penalty for the former cardinal pedophile | Pope …

Pope Francis decided to strip the clerical state, the maximum canonical sanction within the church, the former Archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, who had renounced his title of cardinal surrounded by 39, allegations of badual abuse against him. The sanction against McCarrick, 88, was communicated yesterday by the Vatican after the Ecclesiastical Tribunal for cases of pedophilia of priests, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who found him guilty of behavioral sticker violations with adults and minors, with the aggravation of the abuse of power. The sanction is "final" by decision of Pope Francis and can not be challenged, reported yesterday a note of the Vatican Court distributed to the accredited media.

Recruited into a cell more than six months ago, fulfilling the prayer and penance imposed by Pope Francis by accepting his resignation as cardinal, McCarrick was informed of the decision made on Friday, February 15, the Vatican announced. With the dispossession of the clerical state and the consequent reduction to the secular state, McCarrick will no longer be able to administer the sacraments, to introduce himself or to disguise himself as a priest, nor to receive any financial compensation of ecclesiastical institutions.

The canonical condemnation of McCarrick is therefore the result of a process of badual abuse committed against a 16-year-old boy more than 50 years old, considered one of the "delicta graviora" that the Congregation has in its orbit. McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington from 2000 to 2006, is accused of badually abusing three miners and several seminarians and young priests. On July 20, a man broke the silence after forty years and told the New York Times that the former cardinal had mistreated him when he was a minor and had opened the way for other complaints. . The sentence also comes before the beginning of the anti-pedophilia summit convened by the pontiff from 21 to 24 February.

In July 2018, 88-year-old McCarrick became the first Catholic prelate for nearly a hundred years to lose the title of cardinal and to refrain from any public ministry and to live in a convent in Kansas, United States. .

With this strategically announced decision, the pope urged McCarrick to wake up for the meeting, which will begin Thursday and involve some 170 religious leaders. The reduction to the secular state is the hardest punishment provided by canon law and the former cardinal is the oldest religious in the recent history of the Catholic Church to which this punishment was inflicted. The message that Francisco seeks is clear: no one is untouchable.