In the cathedral sacristy, Cardinal McCarrick, at the time a monsignor who was Cardinal Cooke’s personal secretary, began measuring the student. Mr. Noaker said that the monsignor, “under the guise of measuring his inseam, unzipped his pants, and sexually assaulted him,” adding, “The kid had just turned 16, and kind of pulled back, and McCarrick was a little surprised by that.”
“Let’s not tell anyone about this,” the monsignor told the student, Mr. Noaker said.
Over the following year, he said, Monsignor McCarrick occasionally saw the youth and praised his looks. Selected again in 1972 to be a Christmas Mass altar server, the victim was measured by another man, but Monsignor McCarrick cornered him in a bathroom, Mr. Noaker said.
“He just came in, grabbed him, shoved his hand into his pants and tried to get his hand into his underwear, and the kid had to struggle and push him away,” the lawyer said. “These were significant sexual assaults.” He said the events had lasting effects on his client, whose life, and plans for the priesthood, “fell apart.”
A statute of limitations prevented prosecution in New York, but the cardinal was barred from contact with young people in the Washington Archdiocese, where he lived at a Little Sisters of the Poor retirement home.
As others came forward with accounts of sexual abuse by the cardinal against seminarians, the Vatican announced on July 28, 2018, that Pope Francis had accepted his resignation from the College of Cardinals. Later, prohibited from engaging in any public ministry and pending the outcome of canonical charges against him, he was sent to live at the Capuchin St. Fidelis Friary in Victoria, Kan. In 2021, he was reported to be living in Missouri.