The Grifter and the Cardinal (?)

Well, it's here.........if you choose to believe it.  Schmidt-Grifter tells a story.

Schmidt, 50, started his letter by recounting his own sexual assault while he was a 13-year-old boy at the Rock Hill Boy Scout Camp.

'The older scouts called him "Gay Ray," and taunted and teased us about our inevitable encounter with him when the itch of the mosquito bites became too much to bear. It happened almost precisely like the older kids said it would,' Schmidt wrote.

'Covered in bites, I went to the Medical Cabin. He told me to take my clothes off. I complied. He looked at my body and examined the bites, just like they said he would.'

Schmidt recalled the scout medic applying the ointment to his mosquito bites, feeling 'paralyzed.'

'I remember being paralyzed as his hands moved up my body and brushed over my penis. I remember all of this with perfect clarity up to the moment I was touched. The next part is fuzzier. I just know that I left,' Schmidt said.

He recalled feeling 'lost and strange' and eventually sought counsel from Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, who would later be revealed to have allegedly raped a number of boys and men.

'Learning that the man I trusted to share my soul and the deepest memories of my violation was amongst the most prolific of the Catholic Church's sex criminals permanently shattered my faith and left me estranged from God,' he wrote...

Do the math.  Schmidt was 13 when he was assaulted, which makes it 37 years ago.

37 years ago McCarrick was Bp. of Metuchen.  It would be unusual but not impossible for some random lay-kid to meet the Bish and do soul-searching.

So let's say Schmidt waited a few years to pour out his soul to McCarrick.

McCarrick would have been Abp. of Newark ('86-'00)?  Maybe then.  

But more likely, when McCarrick was Cardinal of D.C.  Schmidt was a heavy-hitter in politics at age 38......making him eligible to visit with McCarrick at that time--and McCarrick was in D.C.

Anyhow, the McCarrick experience apparently made Schmidt decide to go Jewish.

That's different from how the McCarrick Experience played out for lots of other men.