As the red ribbons were tied around the papal bedroom door, the knot solemnly sealed with wax, actor John Lithgow’s character in the Oscar-nominated movie Conclave looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
For Lithgow’s Cardinal Joseph Tremblay was camerlengo – the cardinal who assumes leadership of the Vatican in the period between a pope’s death and the election of a successor.
But that, of course, was make-believe. Today’s real-life camerlengo is former archbishop of Dallas, now cardinal, Kevin Farrell, who seemed equally somber on Monday morning, as he announced the death of Pope Francis.
Farrell, a 77-year-old Irish American who led the Catholic Church in the north of Texas until 2016, is now tasked with the job of steering the rudderless Holy See through perilous waters.
But, as portrayed by Lithgow and Conclave co-star Ralph Fiennes, who played the dean of cardinals, the selection of a new leader of the Catholic Church can be an incredibly fraught moment – one demanding a steady hand and a strong moral compass.
So, while some of those who knew Farrell in Texas heap praise on him, others are questioning whether the affable Dubliner is up to the epic task.
Exclusive interviews with Daily Mail, a whistleblowing priest inside the Catholic Church and one of America’s largest advocates for victims of sexual abuse allege that Farrell’s track record of spotting wolves among his flock puts his judgment in question.
From 2000 to 2006, Farrell served as the vicar general (or deputy) to one of most infamous pedophile priests in America – Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington DC.
As the red ribbons were tied around the papal bedroom door, the knot solemnly sealed with wax, actor John Lithgow’s character in the Oscar-nominated movie Conclave looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. (Pictured: John Lithgow in Conclave).
Today’s real-life camerlengo is former archbishop of Dallas, now cardinal, Kevin Farrell, who seemed equally somber on Monday morning, as he announced the death of Pope Francis (pictured).
McCarrick, who died in disgrace earlier this month aged 94, had since the 1960s been abusing children.
A former altar boy told how McCarrick fondled him before Christmas Mass at New York’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1971 and 1972. In 2018, the church found his allegations ‘credible and substantiated’.
Another man, whose family was close to McCarrick, was sexually abused by the priest when he was a young boy. When he was 16, McCarrick groped him as they went for a walk during his brother’s wedding reception at Wellesley College in June 1974, and then sexually assaulted him in a ‘coat room-type closet’ after they returned to the reception. Before leaving the room, McCarrick told him to ‘say three Our Fathers and a Hail Mary or it was one Our Father and three Hail Marys, so God can redeem you of your sins’, according to court documents filed in 2021.
By the late 1980s, McCarrick was Archbishop of Newark, and was given the use of a beach house in New Jersey, where he forced young trainee priests to strip in front of him and share his bed. His actions were an open secret.
But it wasn’t until 2018 that McCarrick (who resigned as bishop in 2006) was defrocked when the Archdiocese of New York found the 50-year-old allegations that he had molested a 16-year-old altar boy to be credible.
In a statement issued at the time, McCarrick said: ‘While I have absolutely no recollection of this reported abuse, and believe in my innocence, I am sorry for the pain the person who brought the charges has gone through, as well as for the scandal such charges cause our people.’
For his part, Farrell, who for six years lived in the same Dupont Circle priest’s residence as McCarrick, has insisted he knew nothing of the claims.
‘Never once did I even suspect,’ he said in 2018, at the height of the scandal. ‘Now, people can say ”Well you must be a right fool that you didn’t notice.’ I must be a right fool, but I don’t think I am. And that’s why I feel angry.’
‘I was shocked, overwhelmed; I never heard any of this before in the six years I was there with him,’ Farrell told the Catholic News Service that year. ‘I worked in the chancery in Washington and never, no indication, none whatsoever… Nobody ever talked to me about this.’
Kevin Farrell (pictured), a 77-year-old Irish American who led the Catholic Church in the north of Texas until 2016, is now tasked with the job of steering the rudderless Holy See through perilous waters.
As portrayed by Lithgow and Conclave co-star Ralph Fiennes (pictured in Conclave), who played the dean of cardinals, the selection of a new leader of the Catholic Church can be an incredibly fraught moment – one demanding a steady hand and a strong moral compass.
From 2000 to 2006, Farrell served as the vicar general (or deputy) to one of most infamous pedophile priests in America – Theodore McCarrick (pictured in 2004), the former archbishop of Washington DC.
While there were no complaints about McCarrick when he was in DC, in 2004, the New Jersey diocese paid out over $150,000 in damages to accusers.
Father Boniface Ramsey, who spent decades warning church insiders in writing about McCarrick, told the Daily Mail that it was ‘impossible’ that Farrell had not heard the allegations against McCarrick, and called Farrell’s denial ‘laughable’.
‘Unless he was living in a cave, he heard the stories,’ alleged Father Ramsey, who retired from his Manhattan church last year, aged 79. ‘In the early 1990s, I called my friend, the Archbishop of Louisville, to discuss a church meeting, where we discovered McCarrick had been picking up young male flight attendants and recruiting them to join the seminary. And Archbishop Kelly told me “we all know”.’
‘Everyone knows, but no one does anything,’ said Ramsey, adding that Farrell had a religious responsibility to either ask McCarrick whether there was any truth to the rumors, or speak to the pope’s representative in DC, the papal nuncio.
Indeed, Ramsey’s verdict on Farrell is damning – that Farrell ‘turned a blind eye’ on McCarrick’s misconduct in order to advance his own career.
He made a clever ecclesiastical judgment, shall I say? His judgment was implicitly: let’s not rock the boat. That’s the kind of guy he is. I presume very few of these guys in the upper echelons are boat rockers.’
Sarah Pearson, spokesperson for Survivors Network of those abused by Priests (SNAP), told the Daily Mail that she, too, found it ‘pretty hard to believe’ that Farrell had no clue about the McCarrick allegations, describing Farrell’s proclaimed ignorance as ‘implausible’.
‘The whole point is that it was an open secret for years,’ said Pearson. ‘Farrell was McCarrick’s chief deputy. He lived with him for years.’
Pearson added that survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy ‘don’t trust’ Farrell and are ‘uncomfortable’ with his position in the church.
Yet Farrell’s Texas friends are adamant that he is the perfect man for the prestigious papal role, insisting that his calm demeanor, managerial nous and warmth make him a fine choice.
Farrell, educated in Dublin and at the University of Salamanca in Spain, was ordained in 1978 and began his career in Monterrey, Mexico.
By 1983, he was in Washington DC, where he remained until moving to Dallas in 2007.
There, he was instrumental in modernizing and professionalizing their systems to report and investigate sex abuse allegations.
‘That wasn’t an issue just for Dallas, but in the entire Western world,’ Dr Matthew Wilson, the director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University told Daily Mail.
‘I was eager to see [Farrell] develop good protocols: not ad hoc responses, but procedures. And he did. He was much more open and communicative than his predecessors, and presided over a zero-tolerance regime – so much so that some criticized him for being too zealous in his investigations of even vague allegations, and felt they didn’t have due process,’ said Dr Wilson.
Though Wilson demurred when asked whether he believed Farrell’s insistence that he was unaware of McCarrick’s crimes.
‘Honestly, I’m not in a position to assess that,’ he said. ‘I don’t know enough to know whether they were personal friends, or just acquaintances.
Judge Clay Jenkins, who presides over Dallas County, also praised Farrell’s handling of abuse claims while in Texas.
‘I don’t want to speak ill of [Farrell’s] predecessor, but there were some questions about how things had been handled. And I can’t speak to every issue, but I can’t think of a situation where I had enough knowledge of an allegation of abuse to think Farrell did the wrong thing.’
Jenkins further described Farrell as ‘disarming, funny, and with business savvy’. He was also pragmatic.
In 2012, when Obamacare was introduced, Jenkins told Farrell that he needed his help getting marginalized people to sign up and receive medical care they were entitled to. At the time a Catholic charity was campaigning against it, arguing that the provision guaranteeing access to contraception went against their faith.
Farrell weighed up the arguments and decided that ‘getting people on healthcare would lead to saving lives and better outcomes, said Jenkins. Farrell then placed tables with sign-up sheets outside his churches.
By the late 1980s, McCarrick was Archbishop of Newark, and was given the use of a beach house in New Jersey, where he forced young trainee priests to strip in front of him and share his bed. His actions were an open secret. (Pictured: Pope Francis and McCarrick).
In 2014, when unaccompanied migrant children were stranded at the US-Mexico border, Farrell was ‘instrumental’ in bringing them to Dallas and securing safe accommodation.
Later that year, when America’s first Ebola patient landed in Dallas, Farrell opened the doors of his church retreat to the man’s wife and family, to escape intrusive neighbors and global media crews. ‘We help people because we’re Catholics, not because they are,’ said Farrell at the time.
Jenkins and others who DailyMail.com spoke to all repeated his line.
‘We dealt with crises – police shootings, Ebola, mass casualty events, flooding, tornadoes – and saw each other outside of that too,’ said Jenkins. ‘He was calm, cool. Not only a colleague, but also a friend.’
In 2016, Pope Francis summoned Farrell to Rome and made him a cardinal, appointing him camerlengo in 2019.
Reverend Joshua Whitfield was accepted by Farrell into his diocese, despite being married with five children. Whitfield was an Anglican minister before converting, making him one of only a handful of Catholic priests with spouses. Farrell, he says, was unfazed.
‘In any situation he’ll find the good in a person,’ said Whitfield. ‘He’s caring, and with a brilliant mind. We all thought he could run a Fortune 500 company, he has that type of brain. He really knew how to run an organization.’
Whitfield said he was well-placed to stage the conclave, praising his ‘creative Catholicism that refuses to be captured by either side.’
He last saw Farrell in November, when he was in Rome for a week.
‘He said to meet him at Saint Anne’s Gate, and we drove off in his Volkswagen to a little off-the-beaten-track Italian restaurant,’ Whitfield recalled. ‘I asked him about the conclave. And he wasn’t looking forward to it, per se. But he definitely felt he could do it.’
