Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington and the highest American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church to be accused of sexually abusing minors and seminarians — a charge that stripped him of his ministry, his place in the College of Cardinals and his priesthood, reducing him to the status of a layman — has died. He was 94.

Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, archbishop of Washington, confirmed the death in a statement, which provided no further details. A statement by the Vatican said he died on Thursday in Missouri, where he had been reported to be living.

The accusations against Cardinal McCarrick, who had helped shape many of his church’s policies for responding to its sexual abuse crisis, were shocking but hardly incredible when they came to light in 2018, after a church investigation concluded that he had molested a teenage altar server in 1971 and 1972 while he was monsignor in New York City. Thousands of priests before him had faced charges of abuse, and the church had paid victims hundreds of millions in settlements. In 2012, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the archbishop of Boston and America’s senior prelate, resigned amid revelations that he had protected pedophile priests for years.

Although Cardinal McCarrick promptly resigned his ministry “at the direction of Pope Francis,” church officials said, he contended that he was innocent, saying he had no recollection of the reported abuse. He cooperated with the church’s inquiry and did not contest its findings. “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,” he said.

Other sexual misconduct allegations against him soon emerged. Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark said that during a McCarrick ministry in Metuchen, N.J., in the 1980s, when Cardinal McCarrick was bishop of the diocese there, three adults accused him of improprieties that led to two financial settlements. And former priests said he had had sexual contact with dozens of New Jersey seminarians, who called him “Uncle Ted.”

In 2018, as the allegations against Cardinal McCarrick widened, the Vatican, moving expeditiously to contain a scandal at the highest levels of the church, announced that Pope Francis had accepted his resignation from the College of Cardinals, suspended him from priestly duties and ordered him into a secluded “life of prayer and penance,” pending the outcome of a canonical trial in early 2019. He temporarily remained a priest, with the title of archbishop, but was stripped of his highest honor, his designation as a cardinal, and church officials said he would no longer be called on to advise the pope or travel on his behalf.

Resignations from the College of Cardinals for any reason are extremely rare — the last one, by a French prelate in 1927, was over political tensions with the Holy See. Archbishop McCarrick was said to be the first cardinal in history to step down because of sexual abuse allegations.

In a final ignominy, the Vatican announced in February 2019 that Pope Francis had expelled the archbishop from the priesthood after the canonical trial had found him guilty of sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians over decades.

“The Holy Father has recognized the definitive nature of this decision made in accord with law,” the Vatican said of the sentence handed down by the church’s doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which also rejected an appeal by the defendant.

Vatican officials said it appeared to be the first time that a former cardinal in the United States had been defrocked, or returned to the laity and stripped of all priestly identity, and the first time a former cardinal had been laicized for sexual abuse. Indeed, while hundreds of priests had been laicized for sexually abusing minors, few of the church’s leaders had faced severe discipline.

In late July 2021, criminal charges were lodged against the former cardinal for the first time, accusing him of assaulting a 16-year-old boy in 1974 at a wedding reception for the boy’s brother on the grounds of Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The name of the victim, now in his 60s, was redacted in a complaint.

Filed by the Wellesley police in Dedham District Court, the complaint charged Mr. McCarrick with three counts of indecent assault and battery on the boy on June 8, 1974, during a walk together on the college grounds and later in a cloakroom in the hall where the wedding reception took place. Each count carried a penalty of up to five years in prison. An arraignment was set for September that year.

To the frustration of many prosecutors, and victims and their families, Mr. McCarrick avoided punishment time and again because statutes of limitations had made cases difficult to pursue. But the Wellesley charges were allowed to proceed because of a feature of Massachusetts law: The clock on the statute of limitations stopped when Mr. McCarrick was not in the state.

The accuser told investigators that he had been assaulted by Mr. McCarrick repeatedly over many years into adulthood in New York, New Jersey and California. In addition to the accuser’s criminal charges, several civil suits were filed in New York and New Jersey in recent years by men accusing Mr. McCarrick of sexually assaulting them when they were minors.

On April 17, 2023, as the public furor over the litany of accusations against Mr. McCarrick seemed to be fading, he was charged in a second criminal complaint with sexually assaulting a 19-year-old in 1977 at a home on Geneva Lake in southern Wisconsin, where they were both guests. Prosecutors said the victim was swimming off a dock when Mr. McCarrick and another man entered the water and fondled his genitals without his consent.

The complaint said that the victim, who was not named, also claimed that Mr. McCarrick had sexually assaulted him on numerous occasions and in other states, first exposing himself to the victim when he was 11. A lawyer for Mr. McCarrick, Barry Coburn, said he had no comment on the new charge or on the ongoing Massachusetts case. Both cases were able to proceed because Mr. McCarrick was not a resident of the state, and statutes of limitation did not expire once he left the states.

Decades of Abuse

An investigation by The New York Times in 2018 revealed that members of the church hierarchy had known for decades about accusations that Father McCarrick had preyed on men who aspired to the priesthood, sexually harassing and touching them. In addition, a 60-year-old man, who called himself only “James” in his contacts with The Times, but who subsequently identified himself publicly as James Grein, told the newspaper and Vatican investigators that Father McCarrick, a close family friend, had begun to abuse him in 1969, when he was 11 years old, and that the abuse had continued for almost two decades.

Many of the questions about how Cardinal McCarrick was able to avoid exposure for his crimes seemed to have been answered by a Washington Post investigation in late 2019, showing that starting in 2001, he had sent checks totaling more than $600,000 to some 100 powerful Catholic clerics, including Vatican officials, some of them directly involved in assessing misconduct claims against him. The checks were drawn from a special charity account of the Archdiocese of Washington, where he began serving as archbishop in 2001, The Post said.

In November 2020, the Vatican released a report detailing how the disgraced former prelate had risen through the church hierarchy despite longstanding allegations of sexual misconduct. The report, based on an investigation commissioned by Pope Francis, in which he largely absolved himself, put fault chiefly on his predecessors, Pope Benedict XVI, and in particular on Pope John Paul II. It said John Paul had ignored explicit warnings about sexual abuse by Mr. McCarrick, choosing to believe his denials and “misleading and inaccurate” accounts by several American bishops. Three of the four bishops, it said, found that Mr. McCarrick had shared a bed with seminarians and young adult men, but said they were not sure there had been sexual contact.

Fluent in Spanish, French, Italian and German, Cardinal McCarrick — an advocate for progressive social causes who also reinforced church dogma — served as John Paul’s emissary on human rights missions for years, traveling to war and disaster zones for Catholic Relief Services and to developing countries to assess religious freedoms.

He was often exposed to danger. He reported atrocities in Lebanon, Rwanda and Kosovo; was detained by gunmen in Bosnia; toured China for the U.S. State Department; and assessed Eastern Europe for the church after the Cold War. He met Fidel Castro in Cuba and went to Vietnam seeking greater religious freedoms for its people.

After decades as a Vatican troubleshooter, he was appointed by John Paul in November 2000 to preside over the Archdiocese of Washington and was soon named a cardinal. He was 70, five years short of normal retirement age, but his diplomatic skills and friendships with President Bill Clinton and other V.I.P.s made him a natural choice for the hub of American and world political affairs.

Over the next five years, he became a popular spiritual leader of 560,000 Catholics in 140 parishes in the District of Columbia and five Maryland counties, including 200,000 Spanish-speaking and 100,000 African-American Catholics. He was also one of the most visible Catholic churchmen in America, appearing on public affairs shows and profiled and quoted in magazines and newspapers.

Champion of Immigrants

Before his fall, Cardinal McCarrick had been a champion of immigrants and the homeless and a foe of discrimination. To the church, he was a reliable spokesman for orthodoxy, opposing abortion and defending celibacy for an all-male priesthood, heterosexual marriage and the infallibility of the pope on doctrinal matters.

His relationship with President George W. Bush began productively. Dining together at his residence after both took office in 2001, the cardinal sought aid for El Salvador, which had just experienced a devastating earthquake, and asked that Salvadorans living illegally in the United States be allowed to stay and work for a year to send money home. Mr. Bush granted both requests.

The cardinal then flew to El Salvador, bringing with him archdiocesan collections for the displaced. “You can’t separate your work by just helping on the inside of the church,” he told The Times afterward. “All of the teaching we have is to change the world for the better on the inside and the outside.”

He raised $185 million for parish projects, religious vocations, social services and Catholic schools. He also supported Washington’s public schools, attended by thousands of Catholic children. He opened a seminary and, having ordained 320 priests since becoming a bishop in 1977, ordained 12 more in his last year in office, a time of dwindling vocations.

As revelations of child sex abuse by priests swept the country in 2002, Cardinal McCarrick took a leading role in the church’s response to the cases, many dating back decades. After meeting with the pope and Vatican officials in Rome, he announced a “one strike and you’re out” policy for new cases.

“Anyone in the future who would do something like that to a child or a youngster, then that is it,” he told reporters in St. Peter’s Square, suggesting a zero-tolerance policy for sexual predators in the priesthood — the policy eventually adopted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

But early written proposals, of which the cardinal was a principal author, were murkier. They prescribed dismissal for “a priest who has become notorious and is guilty of the serial, predatory, sexual abuse of minors,” while suggesting another path for those who were “not notorious.” Bishops would decide who was “notorious.” There was no mention of past cases, or of any role for the laity.

In 2003, a month before a United States-led coalition invaded Iraq to oust President Saddam Hussein and destroy weapons of mass destruction he allegedly had stockpiled, Cardinal McCarrick, speaking on behalf of America’s Catholic bishops, argued against precipitate action. “If someone is going to attack our own country, then you certainly have the right to defend yourself,” he said in a Vatican Radio broadcast. “In fact, governments have an obligation to defend their people. What the bishops have said is that at the present time we do not see that threat so clearly placed before us.”

The ensuing war in Iraq became a nine-year struggle that cost $2 trillion and 4,500 American lives. Iraq lost tens of thousands of its own people and proved to have no biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which killed 230,000 people in 14 nations, the cardinal went to Sri Lanka. In 2005, he visited Louisiana and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina killed 1,800 people.

He also headed a panel of Catholic bishops and public officials that sought to mediate with Catholic politicians who, in their public actions, rejected or ignored church teachings on abortion and other moral questions. He and other panel members opposed sanctions, like barring such politicians from receiving Holy Communion.

“There should be no place in the Body of Christ for the brutality of partisan politics, the impugning of motives or turning differences in pastoral judgment into fundamental disagreements on principle,” Cardinal McCarrick said as he retired in 2006. “Civility and mutual respect are not signs of weakness or lack of commitment, but solid virtues which reflect confidence and faith.”

An Altar Boy in New York

Theodore Edgar McCarrick was born in New York City on July 7, 1930, the only child of Theodore Egan McCarrick and Margaret (McLaughlin) McCarrick. His father, a ship’s captain, died of tuberculosis when the boy was 3, and his mother worked in a Bronx auto parts factory. He was an altar boy in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, where he grew up.

He went to Fordham Preparatory School, then spent a year in Switzerland studying languages. He also resolved to become a priest. He attended Fordham University and St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1954 and a master’s in history in 1958. He was ordained by Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York in 1958.

At The Catholic University of America in Washington, he earned a master’s in social science in 1960 and a doctorate in sociology in 1963. From 1965 to 1969, he was president of the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico. Recalled to New York, he became an education aide to Cardinal Terence Cooke for two years and his private secretary for six years.

In 1976, he met Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland, the future Pope John Paul II, who was visiting New York as part of a trip to attend the International Eucharistic Congress held that year in Philadelphia. In 1977, Pope Paul VI named him auxiliary bishop of New York, and in 1981, John Paul made him the first bishop of Metuchen, a new diocese in New Jersey, where he founded parishes and outreach programs for Black and Hispanic Catholics.

Named archbishop of Newark in 1986, he presided for 14 years over 1.3 million Catholics in four counties. He developed programs to help H.I.V. victims and combat drug abuse. In the 1990s, after the fall of Soviet Communism, he visited Poland, Romania, Russia and war-torn republics of the former Yugoslavia.

Archbishop McCarrick investigated human rights violations on two missions to Bosnia. In 1992, he saw destroyed towns and throngs of refugees, and under rocket and artillery fire he was nearly taken hostage at a border crossing. In 1994, he inspected war-crime scenes and was detained by Serbian gunmen. He also went to Rwanda, where more than 800,000 Tutsi had been slaughtered by Hutu militias. Mr. Clinton presented him with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights in 2000.

After retiring in 2006, Cardinal McCarrick lived in Washington, occasionally traveling abroad as an unofficial Vatican ambassador. He spoke at a graveside service for Senator Edward M. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery in 2009.

In 2013, he passed out while celebrating Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, was diagnosed with a heart problem and had a pacemaker installed.

On June 20, 2018, he was thrust back into the spotlight when the Archdiocese of New York announced that he had been removed from the ministry after an inquiry affirmed accusations that he had long ago sexually abused an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

The allegations had been made months earlier by the victim, a married businessman in New Jersey who asked to remain anonymous. The man had spoken to the archdiocese’s Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program, which since its inception in 2016 had paid out $55 million to settle sexual abuse cases out of court.

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 the student. 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.

As others came forward with accounts of sexual abuse by the cardinal against seminarians, the Vatican announced on July 28, 2018, that Pope Francis had accepted his resignation from the College of Cardinals. Later, prohibited from engaging in any public ministry and pending the outcome of canonical charges against him, he was sent to live at the Capuchin St. Fidelis Friary in Victoria, Kan. In 2021, he was reported to be living in Missouri.

On Feb. 16, 2019, the Vatican announced that Mr. McCarrick had been found guilty in the canonical trial of several crimes: “solicitation in the Sacrament of Confession, and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power.” It also said that Mr. McCarrick had been laicized, stripping him of all priestly identity and revoking church-sponsored resources like housing and financial benefits.

Responding to the announcement, Mr. Grein spoke of his own victimization. “For years I have suffered, as many others have, at the hands of Theodore McCarrick,” he said. “It is with profound sadness that I have had to participate in the canonical trial of my abuser. Nothing can give me back my childhood.”

Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a statement: “The Holy See’s announcement regarding Theodore McCarrick is a clear signal that abuse will not be tolerated. No bishop, no matter how influential, is above the law of the church.”