First published in Catholic Family News

Introduction

It’s been almost twenty years since this writer introduced St. Peter Damian’s moral masterpiece, the Book of Gomorrah, [1] to readers of Catholic Family News. [2]

And now, thanks to CFN editor Matt Gaspers, here I am again – this time to review somewhat belatedly, the long-awaited “Report on the Holy See’s Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related to Former Cardinal Edgar McCarrick (1930 to 2017), aka, “the Report,” released by the Holy See on November 10, 2020. [3]

The reader will recall that the McCarrick investigation was initiated by Pope Francis on October 6, 2018. Thus, by the time the Report was published, two years had passed, and the McCarrick case had already been adjudicated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. McCarrick had been convicted of sexual solicitation during the Sacrament of Confession and sins against the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue with minors and adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power. [4] He had resigned the Cardinalate and had been laicized, that is, reduced to the lay state and was living at an undesignated location.

One of the primary advantages of being able to assess the 449-page online document retrospectively, is that it has afforded this writer an opportunity to reread and examine the report multiple times in greater depth in an atmosphere more conducive to serious reflection and study.

Also, what was not clear when the Report was initially published, is that the document was not researched, written, and vetted by clerical staffers within the Vatican Secretariat of State, but by an American lawyer named Jeffrey Stanley Lena of Berkeley, California, and his associates.

Lena is the legal lay consultant and public relations conferee who represents the Holy See on civil matters in American courts. He has worked for the Vatican since 2000, and has an office at the Secretariat in Rome. As a member of the “Papal Teams” of John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis, Lena has successfully represented the Holy See for more than twenty years in a number of highly publicized legal cases in the United States. [5]

Knowing that the McCarrick Report was ultimately put together by an American lawyer working for the Holy See explains a great deal about the Report’s style and its restricted scope, evidence, and content.

Other Factors Influencing the Report’s Direction

In his introduction to the McCarrick Report, Secretary of State Pietro Card. Parolin states that the purpose of the investigative document is to ascertain the “relevant facts” surrounding the McCarrick two-year investigation, by placing the facts in their “historical context,” and evaluating them “objectively (emphasis added).” [6]

Similar sentiments are expressed by Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, “I hope like many others, out of respect for the victims and the need for justice, that the investigation … in the United States and in the Roman Curia will finally offer us a critical, comprehensive view on the procedures and the circumstances of this painful case, so that such events are not likely repeated in the future (emphasis added).” [7]

Unfortunately, these expectations are not realized in the Report.

Over the last thirty-three years, my experience in dealing with official investigative Vatican documents related to clerical sex crimes is that information which is not revealed or is hidden or coded in the documents is more important and relevant than that which finds its way into print.

This is why this article is not so much about the truths or falsehoods found in the Report, but rather, what Lena and Company failed to research and report on.

After all, it’s not Lena’s job to defend, protect, and advocate for the rank and file victims of Catholic clerical sexual abuse, mainly adolescent boys, and young men. Instead, Lena’s job is to protect the interests of the Vatican and the reigning pontiff. And that’s just what the McCarrick Report does.

But before examining the critical omissions in the Report, let us examine the general format, details and information the Report does provide.

A Disjointed Biography of McCarrick

The bibliographical data on former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick is divided into four terribly disjointed and distracting sections featuring: (1) His early childhood years and life as a seminarian, priest, and auxiliary bishop; (2) His climb up the clerical career ladder as the Bishop of Metuchen, N.J.; (3) His appointment as Archbishop of Newark, N.J.; (4) And finally his rise and fall as Archbishop of Washington D.C.

The details of McCarrick’s early life as an only-child, orphaned at three years of age, are niggardly and very, very selective. [8]

For example, the Report states that Theodore Edgar McCarrick was born on July 7, 1930, in the Washington Heights section of New York City; that his father was a local ship captain who died of tuberculosis; that his mother was a factory worker; and that the young boy was raised by his maternal aunt. [9] To their credit, the writers of the Report did repeat on several occasions that, as an only child, McCarrick never had any siblings or male “cousins” or “nephews” with whom he later shared his bed. [10]

However, the Report omits the fact that McCarrick’s beautiful mother served as an artist’s model, a bohemian occupation which the Report writers deemed unseemly enough to ignore. [11]

But more importantly, the Report approvingly states, “McCarrick graduated from Fordham Preparatory School, one of New York’s prestigious Catholic high schools, after which he spent over a year in Switzerland.” [12]

Omitted from the Report is any reference to young McCarrick’s previous expulsion from Xavier High School in Manhattan in his junior year, ostensibly for truancy, after which he was immediately picked up by Fordham Prep, thanks to family connections. [13]

But the McCarrick family was relatively poor, so who was paying for Theodore’s travels abroad?

Wasn’t Lena’s staff a bit curious?

Apparently not, although a partial answer is found hidden in plain sight in the Report’s footnote no. 51 (p. 15), in which the reader learns that after graduation from Fordham Prep in 1949, McCarrick went to Switzerland to attend “the Institute Rosenberg and the École Lémania, which helped him develop a facility in French, German and Italian.” [14]

In fact, his trip abroad did much more – it set young McCarrick on the road to ambition and power within the Roman Catholic Church.

McCarrick’s Early St. Gallen Connections

A description of the famous “Institut auf dem Rosenberg,” located in St. Gallen, Switzerland, is given by writer Joseph Bullmore in Airmail titled “The Playing Fields of Money – The Swiss school that charges around $130,000 a year to raise the future global elite.” [15]

According to Bullmore, while Eton brags about its “born-to-rule” alumni, the historic Rosenberg (1889), a private international boarding school keeps the names of its former students secret. But as Bernhard Gademann, fourth-generation headmaster of the Rosenberg tells Bullmore, “They’re technology founders, Silicon Valley figures, members of well-established dynasties – real world changers.” [16] Apparently, young McCarrick got the message.

The limited international student body of 230 is given the finest education money can buy. Students are housed in “art-nouveau villas” with en-suite bathrooms. They are professionally instructed in the sport of their choice including tennis, horse-riding, and fencing. Their planned meals are produced by chefs of international stature. Philosophically speaking, they are imbued with the virtue of “understanding the meaning of one’s privileged start in life.” [17]

Although the Rosenberg caters to the ambitious youth of the world’s entrepreneurial elite and royal imperial dynasties, ages six to nineteen, it apparently made an exception in the case of Theodore McCarrick who attended the Rosenberg periodically between the years of 1947 to 1951, as well as the Swiss international school of languages, the École Lémania in Lausanne.

Who made this extraordinary venture possible? Who was McCarrick’s mysterious benefactor?

To find the answer we have to look outside of the Report to one of McCarrick’s long-term sexual victims, James Grein, whose name is conspicuously absent from the Report.

Young McCarrick’s benefactor was the wealthy and influential Otto Edelmann of Teaneck, N.J., who was James Grein’s maternal grandfather. James’ mother was Ruth Lydia Edelmann. The elder Edelmann paid the traveling and tuition bills to Switzerland for both McCarrick and Werner Edelmann, Ruth’s younger brother and McCarrick’s bosom buddy and soul mate. [18]

McCarrick and Werner Edelmann originally met at Fordham Prep and became inseparable friends. Werner introduced “Teddy” to his grandfather who took an immediate liking to the young man and “adopted” the “orphaned” McCarrick, who quickly became a family fixture at the Grein’s family home for decades to come. After his ordination in May 1958, McCarrick baptized the newly-born James Grein, and later married five of the seven Grein children. [19]

As it happens, Otto Edelmann was originally from St. [Sankt] Gallen, Switzerland. Hence, it was he who was responsible for McCarrick’s life-long connections to the famous Swiss city which has been linked in recent years to the so-called St. Gallen Mafia that allegedly masterminded Jorge Bergoglio’s rise to the papacy. [20]

A Test of McCarrick’s Character

McCarrick eventually repaid all the kindnesses and charity of his benefactor, Otto Edelmann, and the Grein family, by sexually assaulting 11-year-old James on Thanksgiving (and again on Christmas) of 1969 at the Grein home when McCarrick took James up to his bedroom to hear the young boy’s confession.

At the time of his first attack on the innocent and trusting James Grein, the 39-year-old monsignor was the Associate Secretary for Education for the homosexual-ridden Archdiocese of New York headed by Cardinal Terence Cooke, Cardinal Francis Spellman’s successor.[21]

Again, thanks to the influence of the elder Edelmann who had introduced McCarrick to both prelates, McCarrick became Cooke’s personal secretary in 1971. The appointment required his move to the “Powerhouse,” the five story Gothic mansion behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and signaled the promise of advancement up the ecclesiastical corporate ladder.

On May 24, 1977, at age 46, McCarrick was consecrated an Auxiliary Bishop of New York by Cardinal Cooke.

All the while, McCarrick’s sexual abuse of James Grein and other young boys and men continued unabated. Indeed, as a world-wide traveler with Cardinal Cooke, new and copious horizons in human (sex)-trafficking opened up for the now habituated criminal pederast – an explosive topic nowhere explored in the Report with the exception of footnote No. 1252 which highlights McCarrick’s prayer service talk on February 8, 2016, in Washington, D.C. for the victims of human trafficking. [22]

Clearly, the Edelmann-Grein story should have been put front and center in the McCarrick Report. But, as I indicated earlier, James Grein’s name does not appear anywhere in the body of the Report.

Report Pays Tribute to McCarrick’s “Accomplishments”

Instead, the Report wastes precious time and space with endless pages highlighting McCarrick’s “accomplishments” including many “character references” from former associates; dozens of references to his leadership and organizational skills as a member of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and other national and international organizations; his awards; his world-wide travels for ecclesiastical and secular business; and his special talents.

The Report continually rings with praise for McCarrick’s “virtues” albeit in the form of random comments taken from friendly sources. He is characterized as being a “man of virtue,” “highly gifted,” as possessing a “superior intelligence” and “a solid spirituality above reproach,”; as being “pious,” “pastorally zealous,” and an “orthodox excellent leader” and a loyal son of the Holy See.

Throughout the Report, McCarrick is also hailed for his legendary ability to raise money – hundreds of millions of dollars for the reigning pontiff and Roman Curia and Nunciature officials – always with the caveat that the donations had no influence on Vatican policies and decision making. How close do you have to come to the practice of SIMONY in its broadest sense without spelling it out?

As I believe it is clear to anyone with half a brain, one can summarize the lack of due diligence on the part of the post-Conciliar popes and Vatican officials regarding McCarrick’s decades of “misconduct” as “Saw Nothing, Heard Nothing and Did Nothing.” [23]

All this positive chit chat in the Report kind of makes one forget that “Uncle Teddy” was a first class criminal, a homosexual pervert, a perjurer, and most importantly a DESTROYER – of childhood innocence and the souls of his own spiritual sons. A moral monster who committed repeated acts of sacrilege against almighty God throughout his priesthood.

The Heroes in the Report

Aside from previously undisclosed but important information found in Nunciature and Vatican files concerning “rumors” [24] against McCarrick, there is little in the way of new revelations for this reporter.

I was however, repeatedly impressed by the daring and persistence of anonymous Mother 1 who recognized early on that the young McCarrick represented a danger to young boys, and the courage of the seven priests who eventually went public with their accusations against McCarrick. [25]

I don’t think it will escape the reader’s attention that while Lena’s team put these priest victims through the proverbial legal meatgrinder, and dissected their cases with surgical precision in the Report, when it came to detailing McCarrick’s crimes, it fell far short of the mark. Apparently, it was more important for the team to give 27 hits to promoting McCarrick’s book, Thinking of You: The Weekly Columns from the Catholic Standard (2011) than to revealing the victims’ pain and anguished from being preyed upon by the bishop who held power over them.

It is unfortunate that the not so subtle message conveyed in the Report regarding the fate of McCarrick’s clerical and lay victims is that if you bring sex abuse charges against a bishop or cardinal be prepared to go to hell and back in your quest for justice.

Report’s Omissions Render It a Dead Letter

However, the above criticisms may fade into obscurity when compared to other critical information on the McCarrick case missing from the Report (whether intentionally omitted or not.)

Totally absent from the Report is any acknowledgement of the abomination of sodomy in all its forms. [26] Again, the all-pervasive message permeating the Report is that homosexual acts between consenting (and non-consenting) adults, including bishops, priests, and religious, are no big deal. The only real problem is when clerics sexually abuse minors. [27] That’s why, in the end, it was pederasty (not pedophilia) [28] that “done” McCarrick in, not the on-going sexual solicitation of his seminarians and priests.

Cardinal Ouellet makes this point quite clear when he underscores the difference between possible past misconduct involving an adult and the alleged abuse of a minor:

Of course, anything involving a minor would be very grave. But we did not have anything like that that I remember at all. If I thought that he had a past that could relate to a minor, of course I would say it [to the Pope]. It would make the level of importance completely different. [29]

In the matter of the playing down the gravity of the sexual solicitation of adults, including one’s own seminarians and priests, especially in the confessional, Ouellet errs. The sexual molestation of adult seminarians and priests, including sexual solicitation, and the sexual abuse of children are BOTH ecclesiastical crimes. [30]

Compare Ouellet’s uncritical attitude towards bishops who practice impure acts with their spiritual sons – in or out of the confessional – with the scathing indictment of Saint Peter Damian found in his Book of Gomorrah:

(19) What an unheard crime! What a vile deed… If they who approve of these evil doers deserve to die, what condign punishment can be imagined for those who commit these absolutely damnable acts with their spiritual sons? Who can expect the flock to prosper when its shepherd has sunk so deep into the bowels of the devil? [31]

In his Book of Gomorrah, the holy monk also condemns one of “the devil’s clever devices concocted in his ancient laboratory of evil,” that of clerical sodomites who abuse the Sacrament of Confession by confessing their crimes to the same person with whom they have sinned. [32]

McCarrick was known to practice both crimes – sexual solicitation in the confessional and giving absolution to his sex partner. [33] The latter is a “reserved” sin that incurs a latae sententiae excommunication (1983 Code o Canon Law, Can. 1378 §1). Yet, these gravest of sins receive no special attention by the authors of the document.

McCarrick is a Third Generation Homosexual

Perhaps the most detrimental feature of the Report is that it treats the McCarrick scandal as a single isolated case, when in fact, McCarrick is a third generation homosexual prelate in the Spellman line which began nearly 100 years ago. Cardinal Cooke, McCarrick’s boss, was second generation. McCarrick, is the third generation, who before being laicized, had himself created a fourth generation of homosexual prelates.

Among the bishops in this category is the late Bishop James McHugh (1932-2000) of the Camden and Rockville Centre dioceses, architect of the American bishops’ Prolife Program for more than 30 years, who gave false testimony for the Report regarding McCarrick’s homosexual activities. [34] Imagine that! McCarrick’s first consecrated homosexual protégé failed to identify his boss as a sexual solicitor of his own priests!

Concluding Remarks

Lastly, the Report makes little or no attempt to advise or provide true solutions to the homosexual/pederast McCarrick scandal.

Do such solutions exist?

Of course they do.

Saint Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah written almost 1000 years ago offers a perfect analysis of the grave crime of sodomy among clerics with accompanying solutions to reining in and eliminating the vice. But the Report gives no indication that Lena or his associates or any Vatican official who helped write or vet the document ever heard of Peter Damian’s Letter 31, much less studied it.

What are my closing thoughts concerning the McCarrick Report?

I believe that from the Vatican Secretary of State’s introductory remarks to the closing pages of the Report which finally describe, but doesn’t name, the deviant homosexual acts committed by McCarrick against his spiritual sons and male minors’ [35] – was never intended to be anything other than a permanent collection of archival documents and select inhouse interviews related to ex-Cardinal McCarrick’s crimes and eventual laicization, to be deposited and forever preserved in the Acta Sanctæ Sedis, in the vaults of the Vatican Library or the Vatican Secret Archives. [36]

Case Closed!

Not by a long shot!

Although we are unlikely to ever learn the whole truth concerning the McCarrick case we will be learning a great deal more than the Report revealed when and if the pending lawsuits filed on behalf of McCarrick’s victims come to trial including that of James Grein, who, I predict, will receive one of the largest single settlements for sexual abuse in the history of the Catholic Church.

If that’s what it takes to break the back of the Homosexual Mafia in the Catholic Church, I say, “Go to it, James!”

The End

__________________________________

[1] St. Peter Damian, Letter 31, Book of Gomorrah, 1049, Peter Damian Letters 31-60, translated by Owen J. Blum, O.F.M., The Fathers of the Church, Mediaeval Continuation, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1990, pp. 3-53.

[2] Randy Engel, “St. Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah – A Moral Blueprint for Our Times,” Catholic Family News, June & July 2002. Available at http://www.newengelpublishing.com/products/Book-of-Gomorrah.html.

[3] Full text of the “Report on the Holy See’s Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related to Former Cardinal Edgar McCarrick (1930 to 2017)” is available online at resources_rapporto-card-mccarrick_20201110_en.pdf (vatican.va).

[4] Report, p. 26.

[5] A California native, Jeffrey Lena received his BS from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1982, and earned his MA in history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. He obtained his law degree from Hastings College of the Law. Lena taught law at the University of Milan, and the University of Turin. He joined the Vatican staff in 2000.

[6] Report, p.3.

[7] Ibid., p.4-5. Comment taken from Ouellet’s open letter of October 7, 2018.

[8] Ibid., 15.

[9] Ibid., p.15

[10] Ibid., pp. 35, 132.

[11] Randy Engel, The Rite of Sodomy, New Engel Publishing, Export, PA, 2006, p. 758. The 5-volumn set available at www.newengelpublishing.com.

[12] Report, p. 15.

[13] Rite of Sodomy, p. 758.

[14] Report, p. 15.

[15] See Institut auf dem Rosenberg: Cost, Alumni and Other Statistics – Air Mail, October 19, 2019. Airmail is a weekly international electronic weekly magazine.

[16] Ibid.

[17] See Institut auf dem Rosenberg – Wikipedia.

[18] E-mail communication with James Grein, December 21-22, 2020. Note that James Grein who attended a papal audience with Archbishop McCarrick in 1988 has stated that when McCarrick left the hall for a short period, James told Pope John Paul II that McCarrick had been molesting him since he was eleven years old. See fn. 1385.

[19] Ibid.

[20] See Elizabeth Yore’s article, “The Gall of the St. Gallen Mafia,” The Remnant, July 1,2016 at The Remnant Newspaper – The Gall of the St. Gallen Mafia.

[21] For a detailed study of the homosexual network within the Archdiocese of New York during the 1940s-1980s that included Cardinal Francis Spellman, Cardinal Terence Cooke, and dozens of homosexual/pederast clerics see The Rite of Sodomy, Vols. III and IV.

[22] Report, p.17. McCarrick traveled to Vietnam, Spain, Jordan, India, Japan, and other countries with Cooke. For more on McCarrick’s February 2016 speech in Washington D.C. against human trafficking see M. Pattison, “‘I’ve Seen This Too Many Places,’ Cardinal Says of Human Trafficking,” Catholic News Service (11 Feb. 2016), 26 ACTA 19090-92.

[23] Report, p. 60, 277. The term “misconduct” is the euphemism used to describe McCarrick’s criminal acts near the end of the Report on p. 442. McCarrick is known to have engaged in homosexual acts of sodomy, fellatio and masturbation with male minors and adults.

[24] While the Report tends to treat “rumors” of clerical homosexual activity as inconsequential at best, the late A.W. Richard Sipe stated that “rumors” were of value. Sipe noted (1) Sexual violations by their nature are difficult to substantiate because the actions are most commonly executed without a third party observer. The means of determining the facts of an allegation or the truth of denial are usually derivative rather than direct. Priests who abuse frequently instruct or threaten their victims to keep silent. Those threats include warnings that the young person will go to hell, or that he, she, or parents will be harmed if the abuse is not kept secret. Other means of insuring secrecy are by connecting the abuse directly with a religious ritual. (2) Rumors, hearsay, about abusing priests are common and a valid source of information and an important means of child protection if respected and adequately investigated. Rumors form a valid alert to danger and are frequently the most powerful indication to church officials of abuse. The source of these rumors often is grounded in the fact of abuse that can be shared by the victim only with one of his or her equally powerless friends or family members. At times it is as subtle as the abused telling friends or classmates to "watch out for him." Sometimes a minor who resists a sexual proposition by a priest, and tells others, "Father is a fag" starts the chain of exposure. (3) Knowledge by rumor can be widespread and has been available for investigation within the clerical community for decades. Bishops and superiors most frequently irresponsibly and negligently dismiss rumors without reasonable investigation. Bishops, many who also fear exposure of their own sexual activities have continued to exclude themselves from oversight in the directives they instituted in 2002 to deal with the problem of abuse by priests and other church employees. See http://awrsipe.com/reports/sipe_report_V.htm.

Note that footnote No. 1226 states that Pope Francis has long emphasized the peril of relying on rumors and gossip. See, e.g., Pope Francis, Morning Meditation in the Chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae: The Threat of Gossip (2 Sept. 2013) (“We are used to gossip, to spreading rumours, and we often transform our communities as well as our family into ‘hell’ where this kind of crime that leads to killing one’s brother and sister with one’s tongue is manifest.”), 27 ACTA 20318-20; Pope Francis, Presentation of the Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia (21 Dec. 2013) (“For gossip is harmful to people, harmful to our work and our surroundings.”), 27 ACTA 20315-17. P 401.

[25] Mother 1 caught McCarrick fondling her young sons and learned he was giving them alcohol at over-night camping trips. Her anonymous warnings to NCCB/USCC officials and key U.S. prelates were automatically dismissed without any investigation by one and all. The priests mentioned in the Report who came forward – some early and some late – include Priest 1 of the Metuchen Diocese aided by Dr. Richard P. Fitzgibbons and Msgr. James Cassidy; Priest 2, Robert Ciolek; Priest 3, Brazilian Father Lauro Sedlmayer; Priest 4 of the Metuchen Diocese; Priest 5 (diocese unknown); Priest 6 of the Metuchen Diocese; and Priest 7 (diocese unknown). Priest 8 of the Archdiocese of Newark was not a victim, but aided the indominable Dominican priest Boniface R. Ramsey, a former instructor at Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University, in his efforts to bring McCarrick’s misbehaviors with young seminarians to Rome’s attention. Ramsey’s efforts also failed.

[26] Peter Damian, Letter 31, Book of Gomorrah( (1049) in Peter Damian Letters 31-60, p. 5, translated by Owen J. Blum, O.F.M. and Irven M. Resnick, The Fathers of the Church, Mediaeval Continuation, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 2005.

[27]See footnotes 805,834, 964, and 1402.

[28] See The Rite of Sodomy for information on the etiological difference between pedophilia and pederasty, p.445-447. Note that pederasty is the most historic and universal form of homosexuality.

[29] Fn. 1222, p. 400.

[30] Brendan Daly, “Solicitation: A Crime that encompasses a Number of Sins,” The Canonist, Vol 3 No 2, p. 208. Sexual solicitation is not a new delict having been condemned by the Council of Treves in 1227; by Pope Pius IV (1561) and Pope Gregory XV (1622), and Pope Benedict XIV (1741). The crime of solicitation was also specifically condemned in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, Crimen Sollicitationis (1922), Crimen Sollicitationis (1962) and the 1983 Code. As Daly reports:

The traditional description of solicitation as a crime is, ”an invitation to another to commit a sin. Specifically, as a delict, it involves the suggestion or invitation of a priest in the context of the sacrament of penance to a penitent to commit a sin against the Sixth Commandment with the priest. However, in recent years, the definition of the crime has been significantly broadened to include 1) solicitation in the confession “by means of explicit words, advice, promises, signs, actions, or any other method …”; 2) solicitation immediately before or after confession, or under the pretext of confession … . The penalty holds whether the penitent agrees or not, as well as if the priest uses the sacrament to identify their victims and to make his first contact with them (grooming).

[31] St. Peter Damian, trans. Owen J. Blum, O.F.M. and Irven M. Resnick), Book of Gomorrah, p. 15.

[32] Ibid., pp. 16-17. The absolution is invalid unless the accomplice is at the point of death.

[33] Report, p. 449 and 133.

[34] Ibid., p. 18.

[35] McCarrick is known to have engaged in homosexual acts of sodomy, fellatio, and masturbation.

[36] The Acta Sanctæ Sedis (AAS) , founded in 1908, is the authentic and official publication of the Holy See containing encyclicals and other papal documents, decisions of the various Roman congregations, and notices of ecclesiastical appointments, issued directly by the pope or through the offices of the Roman Curia. It is unclear whether the McCarrick dossier will be digitalized and made available to researchers or placed in the Vatican Secret Archives for a designated number of years.