Umair
Patrick Noaker, a lawyer for the man, said that in 1971, his client had been a student at Cathedral Preparatory School and Seminary in Queens, hoping to become a priest. He was selected to serve at the Christmas Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a prestigious honor, and had been summoned to St. Patrick’s to be measured for a cassock.
In the cathedral sacristy, Cardinal McCarrick, at the time a monsignor who was Cardinal Cooke’s personal secretary, began measuring him. Mr. Noaker said that the monsignor, “under the guise of measuring his inseam, unzipped his pants, and sexually assaulted him,” adding, “The kid had just turned 16, and kind of pulled back, and McCarrick was a little surprised by that.”
“Let’s not tell anyone about this,” the monsignor told the student, Mr. Noaker said.
Over the following year, he said, Monsignor McCarrick occasionally saw the youth and praised his looks. Selected again in 1972 to be a Christmas Mass altar server, the victim was measured by another man, but Monsignor McCarrick cornered him in a bathroom, Mr. Noaker said.
“He just came in, grabbed him, shoved his hand into his pants and tried to get his hand into his underwear, and the kid had to struggle and push him away,” the lawyer said. “These were significant sexual assaults.” He said the events had lasting effects on his client, whose life, and plans for the priesthood, “fell apart.”
A statute of limitations prevented prosecution in New York, but the cardinal was barred from contact with young people in the Washington Archdiocese, where he lived at a Little Sisters of the Poor retirement home.
