SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU C7
who would go on to become arch-
bishop of Washington and a car-
dinal, despite persistent allega-
tions of sexual misconduct that
went all the way to three popes. It
would take decades for the cleric
who charmed presidents and ce-
lebrities to be accused of sexual
mistreatment by nearly 20 boys
and men, charges that would rock
the church all the way to Rome.
The unprecedented, 461-page
investigation that the Vatican re-
leased on Nov. 10 marked the
church’s most significant attempt
at transparency in the case of a
high cleric. And it led last week to
the U.S. bishops, at their semian-
nual meeting, coming “face to
face with the failures of the past,”
Archbishop José Gómez, presi-
dent of the U.S. bishops confer-
ence, told the group Tuesday.
But Mother 1, now in her mid-
80s, stranded alone in her apart-
ment by the pandemic, doesn’t
have real expectations for anyone
to be held accountable for McCar -
rick’s rise. The report, she told
The Washington Post in her only
interview, came too late for her
extended family. Pain spinning
out from McCarrick’s treatment
of multiple young males in the
family, she said, has already
carved out deep divisions and
destruction; secrets and denials
have already had their way.
“As far as my family goes, it’s
not important,” she said of the
report. And as far as the bishops
MCCARRICK FROM C1 last week discussing reform?
“Buzzwords like transparency,
compensation, accountability, re-
sponsibility.... I don’t believe the
Church will let these ‘notions’ get
very far,” she emailed The Post.
“The institution before the peo-
ple!”
But she did pause at times
during an interview to consider
the faint possibility that the re-
port’s hundreds of pages of facts
and documentation could bring
some measure of healing in her
family. I wish, she said, “that
those who have doubts about
[McCarrick] will know the truth.”
With the males in her family
alleging harm by McCarrick un-
willing to be identified, Mother 1
spoke on the condition that she
not be named. Several of the men
were interviewed for this McCar -
rick report as well as for a previ-
ous investigation that led to Mc-
Carrick’s defrocking last year.
The family had met McCarrick
in the 1970s, before he was a
bishop, through their parish
priest. He quickly became close to
them, coming over weekly, Moth-
er 1 testified in the report. He
would sometimes celebrate Mass
there and bring the children trin-
kets from his travels. As they
grew, he’d sometimes bring over
other Catholic boys, “who re-
counted enthusiastically the fun
they had on overnight trips with
him,” the report says.
The trips became an exciting
privilege for her boys from a
devout, working-class family.
However, Mother 1 became
alarmed, she said, when she
heard about the sharing of beds,
and when she saw how McCar rick
pressured some of the teens to go
away with him. One, she said in
her testimony, was in tears be-
cause he wanted to attend a dance
instead. Another time, she said,
she almost fainted as she watched
from the kitchen while McCarrick
sat on the living room couch with
two of her sons, across from their
father, with one hand on each
boy’s inner thigh, massaging
them.
Her husband, she said in an
interview with The Post, refused
to believe anything was wrong
and couldn’t fathom a holy priest
doing anything improper. “You’ve
always been a priest-basher,” she
said he told her. The husband has
since died.
She confronted McCarrick, she
testified, and told him “he was
not to intimidate” her children.
He was cool to her after that but
kept up just as much of a presence
around her home. She felt help-
less.
“Ted McCarrick is the devil in
my mind — the devil personified,”
she said in an interview. “It felt
like there was no getting away
from this man’s evil, living in our
midst, injecting himself into our
family and into other families. It
was frightening because there
was no pushing him back.”
It was a sunny day in the 1980s,
Mother 1 told investigators, when
she packed up special pens andpaper and envelopes, got into the
family car and sneaked away. Tell-
ing no one, the homemaker drove
more than an hour to the library
branch near the bishop’s resi-
dence in Metuchen, N.J., where
McCarrick then lived. There, she
handwrote anonymous warnings
about the inappropriate touching
of boys, then mailed them to
every U.S. cardinal and to the
Vatican’s ambassador in the Unit-
ed States.
Yet she felt unsure about what
she was reporting, she testified.
“She had seen things that made
her uncomfortable because they
appeared to her to be of a sexual
nature, but Mother 1 explained
that she lacked the language and
understanding to be sure, even
though, at the same time, [she]
knew he was doing something
very wrong.”
In her testimony, she recalled
that she used the word “children”
and that she had personally wit-
nessed McCarrick inappropriate-
ly touching boys.
“Mother 1 stated that the let-
ters did not use the terms ‘preda-
tor’ or ‘pedophile.’ As Mother 1
recalled, ‘I did not have the lan-
guage to explain it. The letters I
wrote used simple terms. I did not
use any fancy words,’ ” the report
says.
In footnotes, the report quotes
one of her sons confirming she
told him in the 1990s that she had
sent the letters. The report focus-
es on the hierarchy, not on specif-
ic abuse claims, but makes clearthat members of the family dis-
agree about whether McCarrick’s
behavior was inappropriate or
sexual abuse.
Postmarking the letters across
the street from McCarrick’s resi-
dence was as close as she felt she
could get, she told The Post, to
directly threatening a powerful
cleric who had showed up to one
of her children’s Confirmations in
a helicopter. She wanted the man
who she saw multiple times touch
boys in her family to know his
accuser had been nearby.
“My hands were shaking put-
ting them in the mailbox. I was so
afraid he’d open the door and
come out,” she told The Post. In
her testimony, she said she was
driven to warn church leaders. “I
wanted to alert all of them as to
what was going on.” She wrote the
letters, the report says, “feeling
pure anger.”
Terrified her sons would pay
the price if her act was discov-
ered, the woman said, she told no
one for years of her letters. And
over time, her faith turned to
seething doubt that the church
was going to do anything to stop
McCarrick, who continued his
steep rise to the top of the U.S.
church and sailed into retire-
ment, before his case finally ex-
ploded into public view in 2018.
One of her sons told The Post
that reading his mother’s testimo-
ny in the report felt religious. “It
made me think of the Gospel. It
made me think about how when
Jesus was hanging on the crossgetting tortured and taunted by
the powerful, it was the women
and children who stayed with
Jesus while our saintly Apostles
ran and hid,” said the man, who
was interviewed for the report.
The son praised the report as it
was written but agonizes over the
decades that have passed since
his mother’s letters.
The report says no copies of the
letters, nor any reference to them,
were found in the Vatican’s inves-
tigation. A different set of anony-
mous letters accusing McCarrick
of pedophilia were sent to several
top U.S. church officials in the
1990s. The letters were in church
records and were discussed in the
report, and McCarrick himself
raised them in the early 2000s
with Post reporters writing about
the clergy sexual abuse scandal.
He said he brought the letters to
church officials.
“Because I think light is what
kills these things. You gotta put
them in light,” he told The Post
then.
If officials had looked into his
mother’s letters, the son told The
Post, “there’s a lot of damage that
could have been prevented — a
lot. A lot of suffering could have
been avoided.”
Mother 1 said it was traumatiz-
ing to see the report, to see words
in print she’d kept to herself for so
long. Now she just hopes it might
lead to McCarrick facing some
kind of justice. But, she said, “I’m
not expecting miracles.”
[email protected]Mother r aised alarm i n ’80s about McCarrick’s alleged abuses against family
about the complex legacy of slav-
ery in our state.”
The speaker of the Maryland
House of Delegates, Adrienne A.
Jones, U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen
and Ben Cardin, and U.S. House
Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer,
all Democrats, also delivered re-
marks. All but $50,000 of the
project’s $550,000 cost was paid
for by the state of Maryland.
Baltimore Mayor-elect Bran-
don Scott, a 2006 graduate of the
school, said having the memorial
at St. Mary’s is part of a much
broader effort that America needs
to engage in to address its past.
“We are still dealing with the
fallout of enslavement of my an-
cestors, the trauma that is passed
down through generations,” Scott
said in his remarks. The memori-
al can help provide “understand-
ing that the situations that Afri-
can Americans live in today’s
United States of America are di-
rectly connected to what our an-
cestors went through.... This
moment is the moment for us to
finally start to reckon with that,
reconcile and put things on a
better path for the generations to
come.”
Designed by Shane Allbritton
and Norman Lee of RE:site, their
Houston-based design firm, the
memorial was created as a work
of immersive public art with the
idea of prompting dialogue
among the people who see it.
Twenty-two feet long, 15 feet wide
and 18 feet high, the imposing
cabin is encircled by a path on
which visitors can walk and read
the names and poetry on panels of
polished stainless steel in whichsense of possibility out of this
language of profound foreclo-
sure?”
The words reclaimed from the
runaway slave ads paint an un-
sparing picture:
“Lost to the mad sting of winter
Lost to sharp teeth in the neck
Lost to the deformity of owner-
ship”
But there is also resilience ex-
pressed in the words that stretch
across epochs:
“Pay us in endeavor
Pay us in living remembrance”
While the specifics of who lived
in the enslaved households dis-
covered at St. Mary’s College re-
mains unknown, the school’s
president said the project will
help instill a deep connection to
their presence on the campus.
When she saw the memorial for
the first time and read the names
and the words on its walls, tears
came to her eyes.
It also brought her renewed
resolve.
On a visit she made alone to the
cabin earlier this month, Jordan
remembers thinking to herself
that the country has come a long
way, but it has not come far
enough.
“My ancestors were enslaved
and now I’m president of a pri-
marily White institution and
that’s significant,” she said. “But if
you look at all the stuff that peo-
ple of color endure, there are a lot
of things that have not changed.
And so when I see this memorial,
I’m more inspired and motivated
than ever to try to compel this
country to be better.”
[email protected]The memorial, which takes the
form of an enclosed cabin on
which poetry and the names of
enslaved people are cut through
metal panels, sits on the soil
where the artifacts were found. At
night, a light inside the cabin
spills the words and names onto
the surrounding lawn, an ethe-
real effect that allows the stories
of these lost lives to finally emerge
from the shadows. Behind the
cabin are the new stadium and
sports fields whose site was relo-
cated after the discovery was
made.
In Saturday’s virtual ceremony
hosted on the school’s website,
students, school officials, local
community leaders and politi-
cians spoke about the project and
their hopes that it will be a fertile
site for reflection and resolve.
Writer and historian Jelani Cobb
delivered the keynote address.
The project honors “the tri-
umph of the human spirit over
the cruelty of slavery,” Maryland
Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said, and
“provides a new and meaningful
way for Marylanders to learn
MEMORIAL FROM C1
College
unveils
memorial
to enslaved
BY GILLIAN BROCKELLPresident Trump continued Fri-
day to deny the results of the elec-
tion, pressuring state officials in
Michigan and Georgia to overturn
the will of voters and increasing
fears that he might refuse to cede
power to President-elect Joe
Biden.
But those looking to the nation’s
Founders, or the Constitution they
framed, for answers to such a cri-
sis will come up empty-handed.
There is nothing in the Constitu-
tion about what to do if a president
refuses to step down when his
term expires, according to three
historians and a constitutional
law professor.
“No, the framers did not envis-
age a president refusing to step
down or discuss what should be
done in such a situation,” Prince-
ton historian Sean Wilentz said.
“There’s obviously nothing in the
Constitution about it.”
“This is a contingency that no
one would have actively contem-
plated until this fall,” said histo-
rian Jack Rakove, a professor
emeritus at Stanford University.
“We [historians] pride our-
selves in saying, ‘Don’t worry, this
has happened before,’ or, ‘Worry,
this has happened before,’ ” said
Jeffrey A. Engel, the founding di-
rector of the Center for Presiden-
tial History at Southern Methodist
University. “Right now, if all your
historians can say is, ‘We are in
entirely uncharted waters,’ I don’t
even know how the rest of that
sentence ends.”
Recently, Engel asked the
p ost-doctoral fellows and under-
graduates affiliated with the cen-
ter — whose areas of study range
from George Washington to
Trump — to drop everything they
were doing and search for any
historical clues or parallels.
“They all say they got nothing,”
Engel said.
The Constitution says a presi-
dent’s term expires after four
years. That’s it. Congress set Wash-
ington’s first term as officially be-
ginning on March 4, 1789. March 4
became the de facto inauguration
date until the 12th Amendment
made it official in 1804. Then, in
1933, the 20th Amendment moved
that date up to Jan. 2 0 and further
specified a president’s term ex-
pires at noon.
This has been followed to the
letter throughout U.S. history,
when it was both easy and hard,
Engel said. He pointed to Inaugu-
ration Day in 1989, when Ronald
Reagan’s second term was ending
and his vice president, George
H.W. Bush, was about to assume
the presidency. At the close of his
last daily briefing in the Oval Of-
fice that morning, “Reagan said,
‘Good. Well, I guess I’m done,’ and
got out the nuclear codes from his
pocket to hand them to Colin Pow-
ell, who was national security ad-
viser. And Powell said, ‘Mr. Presi-
dent, you have to hold on to those
until you’re not the president any-
more’ ” — meaning, until noon.
Some losing presidential candi-
dates have had better claims than
Trump to seek legal remedies, En-gel said, such as Andrew Jackson
in 1824, Richard Nixon in 1960
and Al Gore in 2000, “but none of
those people ever gave any hint
that they were not going to respect
the legitimate authority of whoev-
er ended up winning the process.”
The Biden team has said that
should Trump refuse to leave on
Jan. 20, “the United States govern-
ment is perfectly capable of escort-
ing trespassers out of the White
House.” But that’s simply “com-
mon sense,” Wilentz said, not a
documented process described in
the Constitution or any other law.
But weren’t the Founders ob-
sessed with the encroaching na-
ture of tyranny? Didn’t they worry
constantly about a president hav-
ing too much power?
Most of them did, yes, though
not all. During the Constitutional
Convention in 1787, Alexander
Hamilton floated the idea of presi-
dents serving for life, but when put
to a vote, the proposal failed 4 to 6.
The power that scared many
Founders the most was that of
commander in chief.
Though not necessarily tied to
an election loss, “there was a lot of
discussion of the possibility that a
president with control of the Army
might refuse to relinquish power,”
said Michael McConnell, a consti-
tutional law professor at Stanford
and author of the new book “The
President Who Would Not Be
King: Executive Power Under the
Constitution.”
At the Virginia ratifying con-
vention, Patrick Henry said: “If
your American chief be a man ofambition and abilities, how easy is
it for him to render himself abso-
lute! The army is in his hands, and
if he be a man of address, it will be
attached to him; and it will be the
subject of long meditation with
him to seize the first auspicious
moment to accomplish his de-
sign.”
Gouverneur Morris, who wrote
the preamble to the Constitution,
warned that if a president was
limited to one term, he might “be
unwilling to quit his exaltation...
he will be in possession of the
sword, a civil war will ensue, and
the commander of the victorious
army on which ever side, will be
the despot of America.”
Perhaps most ominously, one
prominent Pennsylvanian identi-
fying himself only as “An Old
Whig,” wrote about this in
A ntifederalist No. 70 and is worth
quoting at length:
“Let us suppose this man to be a
favorite with his army, and that
they are unwilling to part with
their beloved commander in chief... and we have only to suppose
one thing more, that this man is
without the virtue, the modera-
tion and love of liberty which pos-
sessed the mind of our late general
[Washington] — and this country
will be involved at once in war and
tyranny.
“... We may also suppose, with-
out trespassing upon the bounds
of probability, that this man may
not have the means of supporting,
in private life, the dignity of his
former station; that like Caesar, he
may be at once ambitious and
poor, and deeply involved in debt.
Such a man would die a thousand
deaths rather than sink from the
heights of splendor and power,
into obscurity and wretchedness.”
Some Founders who supported
the Constitution still predicted
that it wouldn’t stop a president
from seizing power.
“The first man put at the helm
will be a good one,” Benjamin
Franklin said, referring to Wash-
ington. “Nobody knows what sort
may come afterwards. The execu-
tive will be always increasing here,
as elsewhere, till it ends in a mon-
archy.”
So why didn’t the Founders
plan for this particular scenario, of
a president simply denying that he
had lost an election? Because they
couldn’t even fathom it, Engel
said.
“They couldn’t fathom two
things: a person who had become
president who was so utterly lack-
ing in classical virtue that they
would deign or dare to put their
own interests above the unity of
the country. And the second thing
is, I think they couldn’t fathom
how any president who would so
vividly display disdain for the uni-
ty of the country, and mock and
undermine the legitimacy of
American democracy, why that
person [wouldn’t have] already
been impeached and removed
from office.”
[email protected]Fr om Retropolis, a blog about the past,
rediscovered, at washingtonpost.com/
retropolis.RETROPOLIS
The Founders didn’t plan for a president’s refusal to step down
they also see their reflection.
“We want people to ask ques-
tions and think about how they fit
into the history of this story,”
Allbritton said in an interview.
“It’s reflecting the current world
as it is but it has this ghostly
quality to it that you can also see.
We hope that people can experi-
ence this and examine themselves
in the greater context of Ameri-
can history and perhaps become
engaged with someone else who
has another viewpoint.”
Allbritton and Lee worked with
Seattle erasure poet QuentonBaker who pored over 198 old
Maryland newspaper advertise-
ments about runaway slaves. He
then removed — or erased — some
of the words from the original ads
to create poetry from the words
that remained.
“You’re looking at an ad about a
person, but it’s about property.
The language that is used in these
ads is so devastating,” Baker said
in an interview. “The work for me
is how can I brush away all these
layers of terror and obliteration to
arrive at something that allows
for storytelling? How do I create aMICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST
“From Absence to Presence,” created by Shane Allbritton and Norman Lee, features names of enslaved
people cut into metal panels, as well as poetry written by Q uenton Baker.“We are still dealing
with the fallout of
enslavement of my
ancestors, the trauma
that is passed down
through generations.”
Brandon Scott, mayor-elect
of BaltimoreBY MARTIN WEILIn Washington, Saturday pos-
sessed both political and meteo-
rological significance. It was one
month until winter, and two
months until Inauguration Day.
In itself, Saturday seemed a day
of mixed messages. Gray skies
suggested an implacably cold sea-
son to come, but temperatures on
the ground told a comforting tale
of w armth.
Saturday’s hours of sullen and
winterlike overcast seemed suit-
ed to a day just 30 days from the
winter solstice on Dec. 21.
But a 64-degree temperature
reading in Washington (and 67 at
Dulles International Airport)
seemed to mock any fretful fears
of impending ice and snow.
Although Saturday seemed to
convey a full spectrum of season-
al signals in a single day, Thurs-
day and F riday, taken together,
also did a good job of that.
Thursday took us past a m eteo-
rological milepost, when the
morning temperature in Wash-
ington touched the freezing mark
for the first time this season.
Not since March 1 (when it was
26) had it been so cold in Wash-
ington as 3 2 degrees.
B ut Friday seemed to banish
frigid imagery by offering an af-
ternoon of blue skies and 6 0-de-
gree temperatures. Even for those
uncertain of the full meaning of
the term, it seemed the very sym-
bol of Indian summer.
[email protected]THE REGIONGray sky unable
to block warmth