archbishop of Washington, D.C., in November 2000 and promoted him to cardinal in 2001, even though he had received warnings in 1999 that McCarrick was rumoured to have committed sexual misconduct with underage boys in seminaries in the 1980s. Although John Paul did open an investigation that "confirmed that McCarrick had shared a bed with young men", it could not confirm whether sexual acts had taken place. The pope decided to believe McCarrick's August 2000 written denial, and moved on with the planned promotions. After Pope Benedict XVI succeeded John Paul in 2005, more information about McCarrick's sexual assaults came to light and he was pressured to resign, which Benedict accepted in 2006, but he kept his status as a priest. After taking office in 2013, Pope Francis was informed about the accusations against McCarrick, but initially deemed them to have already been adequately dealt with by Benedict. Francis did not act until in 2017 an altar boy came forward saying McCarrick had groped him in the 1970s, prompting the pope to launch a canonical trial in October 2018. In 2019, the Vatican found McCarrick guilty of sexual crimes in the 1970 and 1980s "with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power," and defrocked him. The 2020 report blamed all three successive popes for doing too little to address the allegations, although Francis was largely absolved from the blame by ultimately properly finishing the matter. Vatican policy In the book version of his 2019 film The Two Popes, New Zealand journalist and filmmaker Anthony McCarten described the Vatican's policy during the tenures of Pope John Paul II (1978–2005) and Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1981–2005) as follows: 'Rather than excommunicating and bringing to justice those accused after an open investigation, the Vatican refused to divulge information to aid criminal investigations, blocked several internal inquiries, and in countless cases moved priests accused of abuse to new parishes or quietly reinstated those who had been forced by bishops to stand down from their positions.' On 10 November 2020, the Vatican published a report which found that John Paul II learned of allegations of sexual impropriety against former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who at the time was serving as Archbishop of Newark, through a 1999 letter from Cardinal John O'Connor warning him that appointing McCarrick to be Archbishop of Washington D.C., a position which had