Where did Theodore McCarrick come from?

 Susan Matthiesen at the Les Femmes blog wrote back in January about how young Ted McCarrick was expelled from high school at age 15, and was apparently was a ghost for 16 months.  That post deserved a lot more attention than it got. Where was he?  Did the boy sit in his room sulking? Was he with his late father's family in Virginia? Was he running the streets? Who was advising the boy and his mother? I don't know what the truancy laws in New York were in the 40s but surely there must have been some busybody neighbor  or agent of the court who wanted to know where this kid was.

Young McCarrick started high school again at 17, and attended Fordham Prep on scholarship. McCarrick has said that his indefatigable  mother talked to a Jesuit or an family friend alumni, (exactly who has been lost to time), about her bright son and got him into Fordham and that may be true.  I remember reading a speech by a man who said his success began because his father who was a West Virginia miner walked into a rich man's office and told him about his son and the rich man was so impressed by the nerve and devotion of that poor man that he arranged for the boy to be educated at a very good school. At any rate some important person made it possible for young McCarrick to attend Fordham Prep despite his having been expelled from Xavier High School. When I went to high school every girl knew that if you messed up and got expelled that was it. Unless your dad could pull some long strings no other Catholic school in the diocese would take you.

Theodore McCarrick graduated from Fordham prep and although he was a poor boy on scholarship with a widowed mother he was able to afford to go to Europe with a friend on what we now call the gap year. At one point, according to McCarrick  he was in a Carthusian monastery in Switzerland discerning his vocation.  Before James Grein's testimony one could only assume that Mrs. McCarrick was doing quite well at her factory job. Grein, who is believed to be McCarrick's first victim says that his wealthy family took young Ted to Switzerland with them on their vacations so that could be how the plane and train tickets, food and accommodations were taken care of.

After his gap year he comes back to the States goes to Fordham University and then to St. Joseph's Seminary. From there he takes off like a rocket. Les Femmes concludes that young Ted caught some influential perverts eye early on and he used that to further his career and because one or more of his superiors were already compromised nobody was in position to say anything when he began preying on the innocent.  Church Militant and Complicit Clergy have proposed another theory.  What if young Ted met some nasty old perverts and joined in ,but these particular nasty old perverts were part of the school of darkness with Bella Dodd?  As you may have read, Bella left the Communists and converted thanks to Archbishop Sheen. She said that her job in the party was to help with the seminarian project. The project was to get rotten young men into the priesthood, create a network that would serve the party and degrade the Church from within. The young men were promised all the sex they wanted and protection so long as they served. A match made in Hell. No matter who McCarrick's sugar daddy really was it's clear that he had one or several and in turn he played that role for others. This is distasteful but every Cardinal, every bishop and every priest who owes his position to McCarrick has got to be asked two questions: What did you know about McCarrick's beach house and why did he like you so much?