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JAMES Grein, 64, abused for years from the age of 11 by Theodore McCarrick, inset above, has accused McCarrick’s legal team of “coaching” the former prelate for psychiatric assessments that culminated in abuse charges being dropped against him.
Yesterday (Wedneday) a state district judge ruled that McCarrick, 93, was not competent to stand trial on criminal sexual abuse charges in Massachusetts.
The Catholic News Agency (CNA) reports that the dismissal of the charges follows separate examinations of McCarrick’s mental health by health professionals hired by both his and the state’s legal teams, both of which concurred on his incompetence.
McCarrick was charged in state court with three counts of indecent assault and battery relating to allegations that he sexually abused a teenager who was a family friend at a wedding ceremony in the 1970s at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
That teenager was identified in February as James Grein, a former New Jersey resident.
In a statement filed with the court dated August 30, Grein accused McCarrick’s legal team of “coaching” the former prelate for mental assessments.
His defense attorneys seem to have run out of continuances to delay the proceedings further, so they moved on to the competency issues.
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.
Grein 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.’ … The first time he said this to me was in 2012 at the funeral of my mother. His sinister eyes and voice warned me of retaliation if I went public.
A state’s psychologist who examined McCarrick testified in court that McCarrick has cognitive issues and “deficits of his memory and ability to retain information.”
The charges were the first criminal McCarrick has ever faced following several accusations of sexual abuse of minors and seminarians, which led to his removal from the clerical state in 2019.
However, criminal sexual assault charges filed against McCarrick in Wisconsin in April are still pending, as are a number of civil lawsuits.
The watchdog group BishopAccountability.org, which keeps an online database of sexual abuse by clergy on its website, issued a statement Wednesday sharply critical of the case’s outcome.
The group’s co-director Anne Barrett Doyle said in the statement:
Today is a reminder of the Catholic hierarchy’s cynical strategy of cover-up. 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. 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.
Grein said:
I brought the charges in this matter in the hope of finding justice in this court. Instead, McCarrick walks a free man and I am left with nothing. Nothing except the continuing fear of the twice-threatened retaliation.
Hat tip: Stephen Harvie
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