Why Did McCarrick Visit the Obama/Biden White House in July 2013?

December 24, 2020 (Steven O’Reilly) – Roma Locuta Est continues to explore and piece together the happenings surrounding and subsequent to the 2013 conclave which elected Cardinal Bergoglio, particularly as these relate to the ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Our articles to date on the subject have been assembled in the The Conclave Chronicles.

Roma Locuta Est recently came across an interesting piece of information on McCarrick. Before presenting it, let us review some of the background.

Archbishop Vigano in his Testimony had spoken of the “important part he (i.e., McCarrick) had played in his (i.e., Bergoglio’s) recent election” (p. 6); and of McCarrick subsequently traveling to China on behalf of Pope Francis in June 2013. On these topics, Archbishop Vigano wrote:

On the morning of Thursday, June 20, 2013, I went to the Domus Sanctae Marthae, to join my colleagues who were staying there. As soon as I entered the hall I met Cardinal McCarrick, who wore the redtrimmed cassock. I greeted him respectfully as I had always done. He immediately said to me, in a tone somewhere between ambiguous and triumphant: “The Pope received me yesterday, tomorrow I am going to China.”

At the time I knew nothing of his long friendship with Cardinal Bergoglio and of the important part he had played in his recent election, as McCarrick himself would later reveal in a lecture at Villanova University and in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter. Nor had I ever thought of the fact that he had participated in the preliminary meetings of the recent conclave, and of the role he had been able to have as a cardinal elector in the 2005 conclave. Therefore I did not immediately grasp the meaning of the encrypted message that McCarrick had communicated to me, but that......

This leads us to the curious bit of information — mentioned at the beginning of this article — that Roma Locuta Est recently came across. McCarrick met in the White House with Denis McDonough on July 18, 2013. At the time, McDonough was President Obama’s Chief of Staff. Previous to this post, McDonough had worked on the staff of the National Security Council as Deputy National Security Advisor. Vigano’s Testimony suggests McCarrick traveled to China on June 21, 2013; and the McCarrick Report states the ex-cardinal briefed the Pope “upon his return.” Consequently, given the timing, in all probability, McCarrick discussed his China trip with Denis McDonough later in July.

But here is the interesting thing. McDonough’s name is found only once in the McCarrick Report (p. 331), the reference being to McCarrick forwarding a report of a January 2009 meeting with McDonough to the Nuncio in Washington D.C. Yet, no mention is found in the McCarrick Report with regard to the July 18, 2013 meeting at the White House, nor of any similar such report of McCarrick’s discussion with McDonough — a senior White House official — being forwarded to the Nuncio in July of 2013. Why not? Did McCarrick not forward a report of this meeting to the Nuncio? If not, why not? If so, why no mention of it in the McCarrick Report? Did McCarrick deem the nature of the meeting so sensitive that he only reported back on its proceedings directly to Cardinal Parolin or to Francis? If this is the case, did Pope Francis send McCarrick to discuss China/Church relations with the Obama Administration? If so, why? Did the Vatican under Pope Francis seek support/help from the Obama Administration on its new China policy? What role did the Obama Administration, or then Vice-President Biden — as the Obama Administrations point man on China — play in supporting the Vatican’s deal with China?

Then again….perhaps McCarrick didn’t report back either to the nuncio or to Rome. In which case, we may wonder: what was he doing, and who was he doing it for?

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