On November 10, 2020, the Vatican's own Secretariat of State published a report, two years in preparation, on what the Holy See knew about Theodore McCarrick's sexual abuse of minors, seminarians and adults, and when it knew it. This distinguishes the McCarrick Report from every other entry in this record: it is the institution investigating and disclosing its own conduct, rather than an outside body examining it from without.
McCarrick rose from priest to Archbishop of Washington in 2000 and cardinal shortly after, a rise the report shows was not blind to warning signs. As early as 1999, Cardinal John O'Connor of New York wrote directly to Pope John Paul II urging that McCarrick not be elevated because he was a known abuser. That warning went unheeded. McCarrick continued in senior office for nearly two more decades before formal allegations of abuse of a minor became public in 2018, at which point Pope Francis removed him from public ministry. McCarrick responded the same day, saying in a statement that he had absolutely no recollection of the reported abuse and believed in his innocence, while saying he was sorry for the pain the case had caused.
In February 2019, following a canonical process that found him guilty of solicitation and abuse of minors and adults, McCarrick was laicized, stripped of the clerical state entirely, the most severe penalty short of excommunication and the harshest applied to any Catholic cleric of comparable rank in modern history. He remains the highest ranking Catholic official ever defrocked. The report's significance is less any single revelation than its method: a church documenting, in its own words and from its own files, the specific written warnings its own hierarchy chose not to act on.