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Letter confirms Vatican received sexual misconduct complaint about former cardinal in 2000

Vatican City • A 2006 letter from a top Vatican official confirms that the Holy See received information in 2000 about the sexual misconduct of now-resigned U.S. cardinal, lending credibility to bombshell accusations of a cover-up at the highest echelons of the Roman Catholic Church.

Catholic News Service, the news agency of the U.S. bishops’ conference, published the letter Friday from then-Archbishop Leonardo Sandri to the Rev. Boniface Ramsay, a New York priest who made the initial allegation.

Ramsay informed the Vatican in a November 2000 letter about then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s misconduct with seminarians from Seton Hall University’s Immaculate Conception Seminary.