Follow the money:
Months before officials in the Archdiocese of Newark sold a beach house used by former cardinal Theodore McCarrick for sexual abuse and coercion, the archdiocese bought a second beach house on the Jersey Shore, at which McCarrick reportedly hosted friends and courted donors.
The second beach house, according to an investigative report from northjersey.com, was purchased in 1997 by the Newark archdiocese from the neighboring Diocese of Metuchen. The house was located in Brick, New Jersey, on Barnegat Bay.
The archdiocese bought that home four months before it sold the Sea Girt, New Jersey beach house which McCarrick was alleged to have used for sexual abuse and coercion since the 1980s.
Both homes were owned by the Diocese of Metuchen, which McCarrick led as a bishop from 1981 to 1986, before they were purchased by the Archdiocese of Newark, which McCarrick led from 1986 to 2000.
The Sea Girt house was purchased by the Metuchen diocese in 1985, and sold to the Newark archdiocese in 1988.
The Brick house was purchased in 1987 by a Metuchen priest, Msgr. Francis Crine, and Walter Uzenski, principal of the school at Crine’s parish. Crine died in 1989, and Uzenski gave the house to St. James Parish in Woodbridge, NJ, to settle an unspecified debt of Crine’s. In 1994, the parish transferred the property to the diocese, northjersey.com reported.
It is not clear what debt Crine owed to the parish.
Go here to read the rest. The sex abuse gets the headlines, but with McCarrick the money is key to whole rotten scandal and that is why we are still waiting on the report.
I wonder which report will see the light of day first, the one on McCarrick or Durham’s.
Crine. Should’ve been spelled with an m. And when the word Vatican is mentioned vacant to mind.
Homo predators cover for homo predators. No news there.
All looks very irregular. And unseemly.
Andrew Greeley could never understand why people thought it rather rum that he owned a piece of lakefront property in Michigan (along with a house in Tucson). A berth in a rectory or a small apartment ought to suffice for a celibate clergyman, unless he’s the caregiver for an infirm relative. (Greeley’s excuse was “well, if we were limited to what all priests can afford, we’d all have to live in huts”).
Fr. Paul Shaughnessy, SJ offered some time ago that you look around a rectory and you see a well-stocked liquor cabinet and a mess of slick magazines, you can wager the priest’s life of chastity is in a state of disorder.