US justice on Wednesday dropped its charges against ex-US cardinal Theodore McCarrick, 93, because of his “unfitness” to stand trial, two years after he was charged with sexually assaulting a teenager a half ago. -century.
A Massachusetts state judge ruled that “Mr. McCarrick was unfit to stand trial,” according to a short video of a preliminary court hearing in Dedham, in the northeastern New England state. east of the country.
The public prosecutor immediately announced during the same hearing the abandonment of criminal proceedings against the former cardinal who had been charged in July 2021 with “sexual assault on a child over 14 years old”, a charge for which he had pleaded not guilty in September of the same year, paving the way for a trial.
This former archbishop of Washington was defrocked in 2019, a sanction almost unprecedented in the history of the Church concerning a cardinal, after the Vatican had found him guilty of having sexually assaulted at least a 16-year-old teenager in 1974, and to have had inappropriate sexual behavior with adult seminarians.
Theodore McCarrick, 93 and visibly very weak, watched the hearing silently via video link.
In 2021, he had difficulty moving around in court using a walker and was examined last April by a psychiatrist who concluded that he suffered from a form of dementia probably linked to the disease of Alzheimers.
Prosecutors accused her of touching the genitals of a 16-year-old man — who is now 65 — while they were “prayers” together at a college in Massachusetts at the wedding. brother of the alleged victim.
Mr. McCarrick has been the subject of several civil legal proceedings, but the criminal charges now dropped were the first against him. He was the highest Catholic official to have been ousted in the United States due to accusations of sexual violence, an earthquake for the American Church.
Massachusetts is a small American state marked by sex scandals involving the Catholic Church, as illustrated by the film “Spotlight” (2015), which tells how journalists from the Boston Globe revealed how the local clergy had covered sexual assaults and rapes committed by some 90 priests in and around Boston over several decades.
The American Church received complaints from more than 18,500 victims of sexual abuse committed by more than 6,700 clergy between 1950 and 2016, according to bishop-accountability.org.
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08/30/2023 20:36:37 – New York (AFP) – © 2023 AFP