“Today is a reminder of the Catholic hierarchy’s cynical strategy of cover-up,” the group’s co-director Anne Barrett Doyle said in the statement.
“McCarrick’s predations were an open secret. Many of his fellow cardinals and bishops knew, and they did nothing. They didn’t report him to law enforcement, they didn’t go public with the information, and they didn’t reach out to those he assaulted,” she said.
“McCarrick might have been prosecuted years ago if even one of his brother bishops had called the police,” Doyle added. “Instead, yet again, a predator has evaded accountability. While the institution may been spared the embarrassment of an ex-cardinal on trial, the disgrace of its complicity with McCarrick remains.”
James Grein responds
In a statement filed with the court dated Aug. 30, Grein accused McCarrick’s legal team of “coaching” the former prelate for the psychiatrist’s interviews.
“His defense attorneys seem to have run out of continuances to delay the proceedings further, so they moved on to the competency issues,” he said.
“Only they and Mr. McCarrick know the extent of the coaching to prepare him for his two interviews. If McCarrick is found incompetent, they will have won and justice will have lost,” he wrote.
Grein also said that the dismissal of the case and McCarrick’s subsequent freedom could result in “retaliation from his followers.”
He said that when he went public with allegations against McCarrick in 2018, “McCarrick sent followers to my house to remind me that he is the ‘most powerful man in the U.S., if not the world.’”
Grein’s allegations in 2018 were recorded in an interview with the New York Times, which referred to him only by his first name. He told the newspaper that McCarrick had serially sexually abused him beginning when he was 11.
“The first time he said this to me was in 2012 at the funeral of my mother,” Grein recounted in his Aug. 30 court statement. “His sinister eyes and voice warned me of retaliation if I went public.”
(Story continues below)
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Referring to a neurological exam of McCarrick conducted by psychiatrist David Schretlen, who was hired by the defense, Grein said: “I have trouble reconciling the concept that someone who is intelligent and articulate is also not competent to stand trial and answer for his actions.”
Grein said that McCarrick was “part of my immediate family since 1945,” therefore he was able to witness the former prelate’s rise “to the top of the Church.”
“He was charismatic, intelligent, and witty. His mind could work fast and he could control his audience rather quickly. He was brilliant and, methinks, still is,” he said.
“These proceedings were to have provided a modest level of payback,” he said.
“I brought the charges in this matter in the hope of finding justice in this court,” he added. “Instead, McCarrick walks a free man and I am left with nothing. Nothing except the continuing fear of the twice-threatened retaliation.”
‘I pray a lot’