McCarrick Report: No Smoking Gun, Huge System Failure

The long awaited McCarrick Report – or to give it its full, gloriously bureaucratic title, the Report of the Holy See's Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related to Former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick (1930 - 2017) - contains no smoking gun that explains McCarrick's rise through the hierarchy and his gaudy, globe-trotting, post-retirement career. Nor does it contain any evidence that, in climbing the ecclesiastical greasy pole, Theodore McCarrick bribed anyone. Some will undoubtedly conclude from this that the two-year long probe led by the Holy See's Secretariat of State is another Vatican exercise in damage control.