The McCarrick Report confirms it: Clericalism powered the sex abuse crisis.

Title: The McCarrick Report confirms it: Clericalism powered the sex abuse crisis.

Author:  Sam Sawyer, S.J.

Publisher: America Magazine

Date: 12NOV2020

People have been scouring the 461 pages of the McCarrick Report, looking for a smoking gun that definitively explains what went wrong and who should be held responsible for the church’s long-standing failure to take allegations of abuse by former cardinal Theodore McCarrick seriously. But there is no single smoking gun. Instead, the report documents decades worth of smoke during which almost no one went looking for the very real fire producing it. Even more, it gives us a close-up view of concentric layers of plausible deniability and culpable ignorance, powered by clericalism, that allowed McCarrick to evade discovery or accountability.