ROME (AP) A Vatican investigation into former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has found that a series of bishops, cardinals and popes downplayed or dismissed reports of sexual misconduct with seminarians, and determined that Pope Francis merely continued his predecessors handling of the predator until a former altar boy alleged abuse.

The Vatican took the extraordinary step Tuesday of publishing its two-year, 449-page internal investigation into the American prelates rise and fall in a bid to restore credibility to the U.S. and Vatican hierarchies, which have been shattered by the McCarrick scandal.

A summary of the report from the Vatican put the lions share of blame on a dead saint: Pope John Paul II, who appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington D.C., in 2000, despite having commissioned an inquiry that confirmed he slept with seminarians. The summary says John Paul believed McCarricks last-ditch, handwritten denial.

But the report also charts the alarm bells that sounded but were ignored nearly a decade earlier, when in 1993 a series of six anonymous letters were sent to U.S. church officials and the Vaticans ambassador to the U.S. alleging McCarrick was a pedophile who would sleep in the same bed with young men and boys. The ambassador destroyed the letters, and the U.S. church had a policy at the time of not taking action based on anonymous reports of abuse a practice that was recently reversed by the Vatican for the church at large.