When I was in Catholic grade school the nuns used to smack me around a lot, but the verbal abuse was a lot worse. “Jesus doesn’t like you,” my second grade teacher told me, “because you don’t obey!” For year after those four years in Catholic Grade school, I thought God was a giant roving fist looking for someone to smash.  It took twenty years for that to change and, even now, over fifty years later, I still have trouble realizing that God loves me.  But, as we have all learned in recent years, the abuse could’ve been a lot worse.  Few things are as horrible as someone who a child and a child’s parents believe is a human representative of God and the Love of God, using that trust to sexually abuse the child.

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick after allegations that the cardinal sexually abused minors and adult seminarians over the course of decades, the Vatican announced on Saturday. The Pope ordered the cardinal a “life of prayer and penance”.  Resignations from the College of Cardinals are extremely rare for any reason. The last resignation was of the French prelate Louis Billot in 1927, because of political tensions with the Holy See. Keith Patrick O’Brien, a former archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, waived his rights as a cardinal in 2013, after accusations emerged of inappropriate sexual behavior with junior clergy. But he remained in the College of Cardinals until his death in March of this year.

Cardinal McCarrick, 88, was removed from his post on June 20 over a series of allegations of child abuse. He was accused of fondling a teenager over 40 years ago in New York City.  McCarrick’s resignation comes as Pope Francis faces increased pressure to show he is serious about cracking down on bishops and cardinals found to have abused people or covered up abuse. Acting swiftly to contain a widening sex abuse scandal at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church, the pope officially suspended the cardinal from the exercise of any public ministry after receiving his resignation letter Friday evening. Pope Francis also demanded in a statement that the prelate remains in seclusion “until the accusations made against him are examined in a regular canonical trial.”

Cardinal McCarrick appears to be the first cardinal in history to step down from the College of Cardinals because of sexual abuse allegations. While he remains a priest pending the outcome of a Vatican trial, he has been stripped of his highest honor and will no longer be called upon to advise the pope and travel on his behalf.

Pope Francis has faced increasing calls to more forcefully handle cases of sexual abuse involving not just priests, but also leaders at the highest echelons of the church. Earlier this week, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Francis’s chief adviser on sexual abuse, said a “major gap still exists” and called for more muscular church policies to address the punishment of bishops and cardinals.

“Failure to take these actions will threaten and endanger the already weakened moral authority of the Church,” O’Malley said.

Critics say the Vatican still handles cases without transparency and too often fails to take action against priests unless allegations become public. McCarrick was a high-profile figure whose behavior was probably known by many, said Marie Collins, a former member of the Vatican  Commission for the Protection of Minors who resigned last year, citing a reluctance among Vatican administrators to implement the commission’s recommendations.

“I don’t think the pope or the Vatican has changed in any way,” Collins said. “When things are public or are no longer tenable, they are asked to resign, and they have the prayer and penitence. But that is not the same thing as proper accountability.”

A prominent Roman Catholic voice in international and public policy, Cardinal McCarrick was first removed from public ministry on June 20, after a church panel substantiated allegations that he had sexually abused a teenage altar boy 47 years ago while serving as a priest in New York.

Cardinal McCarrick, now 88, said in a statement at the time that he was innocent.

Subsequent interviews by The New York Times revealed that some in the church hierarchy had known for decades about accusations that he had preyed on men who wanted to become priests, sexually harassing and touching them. Then a 60-year-old man, identified only as James, alleged that Cardinal McCarrick, a close family friend, had begun to abuse him in 1969, when he was 11 years old, and that the abuse had lasted nearly two decades.

The Times investigation detailed settlements amounting to tens of thousands of dollars in 2005 and 2007, paid to men who had complained of abuse by Cardinal McCarrick when he was a bishop in New Jersey in the 1980s, and a rising star in the Roman Catholic Church.

A man, who was 11 at the time of the first alleged instance of abuse, said a sexually abusive relationship continued for two more decades. McCarrick has denied the initial allegation.

 On Saturday, the former altar boy whose abuse allegations started the unraveling of the cardinal’s lifetime of honors said in an interview that hearing news of the resignation felt like a “gut punch.”

The 62-year-old man, who identified himself only as Mike to protect his privacy, said he believed that Cardinal McCarrick was resigning only because he was being forced to, not because he was accepting responsibility.

“I am kind of appalled that it has taken this long for him to get caught,” he said, in the first time he has spoken publicly. “But I am glad I am the first one that could open the door to other people.”

The dioceses of Newark and Metuchen, New Jersey, simultaneously revealed that they had received three complaints of misconduct by McCarrick against adults and had settled two of them

As the allegations against Cardinal McCarrick continued to mount in the last month, at least one prominent American cardinal has called for sweeping changes in how the Roman Catholic Church handles sex abuse allegations against bishops and allegations involving adult seminarians, who were not covered in the church’s sex abuse reforms of 2002.

“These cases and others require more than apologies,” Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, said in a statement on Wednesday. “They raise up the fact that when charges are brought regarding a bishop or a cardinal, a major gap still exists in the church’s policies on sexual conduct and sexual abuse.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has not responded to calls for broader reform since the allegations against Cardinal McCarrick were made public last month. The president of the conference, Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, released a brief statement Saturday saying that the pope’s acceptance of the resignation “reflects the priority the Holy Father places on the need for protection and care for all our people and the way failures in this area affect the life of the Church in the United States.”

Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, which documents the sexual abuse scandal in the church and advocates for victims, called for Pope Francis to make the trial proceedings against Cardinal McCarrick public, and to open an investigation into how Cardinal McCarrick was permitted to advance his church career despite repeated warnings against him.

“The officials responsible must be identified and disciplined, and the investigative file must be made public,” Mr. McKiernan said in a statement.

Much remains unanswered about Cardinal McCarrick’s alleged abuses, including who in the church hierarchy knew what and when, and whether, as a supervisor, the cardinal handled abuse allegations appropriately in the dioceses he led.

“The resignation of one man is not the end, it’s really the beginning,” said Patrick Noaker, the lawyer representing the two men who said the cardinal had abused them as minors. “We now have to go out and find out if others were hurt.”

After a Vatican envoy confirmed this year that the Roman Catholic Church in Chile had for decades allowed sexual abuse to go unchecked, the pope apologized, met with victims and accepted the resignation of some bishops— after the country’s clerical hierarchy offered to quit in May. On Monday, prosecutors in Chile said they were investigating 36 cases of sexual abuse against Catholic priests, bishops and lay persons.

In April, Cardinal George Pell of Australia, who as the Vatican’s finance chief is one of the Holy See’s highest officials, was ordered to stand trial in an Australian court on several charges of sexual abuse. The next month, Philip Wilson, the archbishop of Adelaide, was convicted of covering up a claim of sexual abuse in the 1970s.

Victims and their advocates have long held that bishops have not been held accountable for hiding sexual abuse. With his conviction, Archbishop Wilson became the highest-ranking Catholic official in the world to be convicted of concealing abuse crimes.

Last month, Msgr. Carlo Alberto Capella, a former Vatican diplomat in Washington, was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison by a Vatican tribunal for possessing and distributing child pornography. His sentence was the first in modern history that the Vatican’s own tribunal had handed down in a clerical abuse case. He will now face a canonical trial, which could lead to his removal from the priesthood.

While most of the scandals involving pedophile clergy have involved rank-and-file priests, some cases involved bishops, and there are a few involving cardinals, including a current case in Australia of one of Pope Francis’ closest advisers, Cardinal George Pell, who now faces a criminal trial in his homeland.

Bishops have been implicated in the sexual abuse scandals that have stained the Catholic church’s reputation worldwide for decades now, but often for their roles in covering up for pedophile priests by shuffling them from parish to parish and keeping the faithful in the dark about the allegations about clergy whose pastoral duties often bring them into contact with minors.

Earlier this month, an Australia bishop became the most senior Roman Catholic cleric to be convicted of covering up child sex abuse. Adelaide Archbishop Philip Wilson was sentenced to 12 months in detention by an Australian court in a landmark case welcomed by some abuse survivors as a strong warning to institutions that fail to protect children.

A statement from the Vatican said the pontiff received the letter of resignation a day earlier by the former archbishop.

McCarrick’s fall is “gut-wrenching” for local Catholics, said John Gehring, a Catholic author who worked for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops while McCarrick led the Washington archdiocese. “Most Catholics, including myself, are just sickened by the fact that it seems like so much was known about his behavior, and he still climbed the ranks of the church. He never should have been made a cardinal. … It can never happen again.”

McCarrick, 88, was found by the church in June to be credibly accused of sexually abusing a teenager nearly 50 years ago. Since then, additional reports of sexual abuse and harassment by the cardinal, over a span of decades, have been reported. The additional victims include one then-minor and three adults, who were young priests or seminarians when McCarrick allegedly abused them.

McCarrick is the highest ranked U.S. Catholic clergy member to ever be removed from ministry due to sexual abuse allegations, and the first cardinal to fully resign his position since 1927. 

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, from Scotland, renounced the rights and privileges of his position after a string of accusations in 2013 about sexual misconduct. But he did not officially depart the College of Cardinals, and Pope Francis only accepted O’Brien’s resignation two years after the allegations came out.

The Vatican said McCarrick will face a canonical trial, though it did not provide details about when the trial would be conducted. Kurt Martens, a professor of canon law at Catholic University, noted that the Catholic church has typically punished people by ordering them to conduct a life of “prayer and penance.” In McCarrick’s case, the Vatican has imposed that penalty before the trial has even started — raising pressure on the church to find a stronger form of punishment.

“Because you’re running out of options if you want to impose a further penalty,” Martens said. “I would not be surprised if he gets dismissed from the clerical state.” That would mean that after spending most of his life as a church leader, McCarrick would be defrocked entirely — becoming a lay person, not a Catholic priest.

The now-60-year-old Virginia man who alleged that McCarrick abused him beginning when he was around 11, said he was very emotional upon learning Saturday that Pope Francis had accepted McCarrick’s resignation, signaling the church believes the accusers.

“The Vatican now knows everything, realizes the depth of his destruction in the church and that it’s time to clean house,” said James, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used to protect his family. As for McCarrick: “He’s been guilty since the beginning of his life. And he’s now realized he’s cornered and can’t come out.”

Francis’s swift and decisive action regarding McCarrick comes as the pope also contends with a massive case of abuse and coverup in Chile — a country where the Argentine pontiff dispatched Vatican investigators. The country’s 34 bishops offered to step down en masse after meeting with Francis in May; so far, the pope has accepted five of those resignations.

Francis later this month will travel to Ireland, another country where the church was scarred and weakened by systemic abuse.

Austen Ivereigh, a Francis biographer, said the appetite across the world has grown for the pope to show more than just verbal contrition in the biggest cases. “I think a lot of people are saying this is the time for new kinds of action, rather than repeating words,” Ivereigh said. “A much more proactive stance. Of the sort like sending your top prosecutor to investigate Chile. A stance where the pope, when he sees or suspects an institutional omertà, he reacts.”

The allegations against McCarrick unfolded piecemeal over the past two months. In June, McCarrick was removed from ministry when a church review board found he had been credibly accused of abusing a teenager early in his career, when he was a priest in New York. The youth was helping prepare for a Christmas service when McCarrick allegedly put his hands in the boy’s pants.

When he was removed from ministry, McCarrick said he had no memory at all of that incident and maintained his innocence, but he accepted the Vatican’s decision.

Then came more. A Virginia man, now 60, told the New York Times and then The Washington Post that McCarrick, a friend of his father, abused him for nearly 20 years, starting when he was 11. He said it started when McCarrick urged him to show him his genitals while changing clothes after a swim party, and continued into his adulthood.

The New Jersey diocese of Metuchen and the archdiocese of Newark, both of which McCarrick led before he was promoted to archbishop of Washington in 2001, revealed they had reached settlements in the 2000s with two men who accused McCarrick of sexually harassing them when they were adults.

In one case, Robert Ciolek, a former priest, said McCarrick would invite him and other seminarians to a beach house, where there was always one bed too few, so one man would have to sleep with the bishop. Ciolek, who said McCarrick never kissed him or touched him below the waist but did give and demand unwanted back rubs, reached an $80,000 settlement with the dioceses for McCarrick’s conduct and abuse he also suffered at the hands of a high school teacher when he was a teenager in Catholic school.

Ciolek said the church imposed an agreement that he not speak to the media about McCarrick’s abuse, which it released him from this year.

In the second case, which The Washington Post learned about after examining extensive church files, a former priest said McCarrick abused him while on a fishing trip and again on a trip to New York City, where McCarrick made him sleep with him and rubbed his crotch. The New York Times reported the church settled with that former priest — who himself was removed from ministry in the mid-2000s, about a decade after he admitted that he had touched two teenage boys — for $100,000. That priest has not returned requests for comment.

A third man brought a lawsuit over McCarrick’s harassment in 2011 but then withdrew it from the court system. According to files obtained by The Washington Post, that man — a priest from Brazil — also alleged McCarrick forced unwanted sexual acts on him while at a trip to a beach house.

Francis apparently is moving toward a church trial based on the sum total of these news reports, not just the New York case involving the teenager that the church has already investigated. The Vatican’s statement Saturday said the canonical trial would handle the “accusations,” plural, against McCarrick.

The allegations have startled Catholics, especially in Washington, where McCarrick was a well-liked local archbishop from 2001 to 2006.

At the Shrine of the Sacred Heart in Northwest Washington on Saturday, parishioners were discussing the cardinal with their families as they walked into 4 p.m. Mass. Michael Mora, who said he’s very involved in the church, said he had been shocked to hear the reports about his former archbishop: “I feel betrayed.”

“I’m glad that he resigned and the church is doing something about it,” Mora said. “They have to follow the rules of discipline, whoever it is, but especially for someone higher up.”

McCarrick stepped down from the Washington archdiocese when he reached retirement age but remained an active diplomat for the church — traveling around the world at the behest of the Vatican and occasionally the U.S. State Department to advocate for religious freedom and intervene in conflicts.

“The message is quite clear: no person or institution can feel safe,” said Father Hans Zollner, a member of the Vatican Commission for the Protection of Minors. “Even those who hold the office of a bishop or cardinal. If there are allegations, we need to follow the normal procedure, and it’ll no longer be possible to muddy, conceal or hide them in a drawer and forget about it.”

In an interview with Washington radio station WTOP, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who succeeded McCormick as the Archbishop of Washington, said that the pope’s acceptance of McCarrick’s resignation “highlights for me … that the pope takes very seriously the allegation of an abuse of a minor.”

“The pope is saying that we need to show that we are hearing these things, paying attention and acting,” Wuerl said in the interview.

Wuerl also said he has never been approached by anyone alleging of abuse by McCarrick and was unaware of the rumors surrounding McCarrck’s behavior, WTOP reported.

What a great tragedy these actions are.  We all know that mankind is frail and sinful by nature, but can you imagine the sadness that a loving God feels over such abuse in His name?