(CNN) A letter from a top Vatican official appears to acknowledge that the Holy See knew about sexual abuse allegations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick for at least several months before he was elevated to cardinal in 2001.

The document, obtained by CNN, was first published Friday by Catholic News Service

The October 2006 letter was sent by then-Archbishop Leonardo Sandri at the Vatican secretariat of state during the papacy of Benedict XVI. It was written to a New York priest who told CNN that church leaders in Rome failed to act after he alerted them to McCarrick's alleged misconduct with seminarians.

"I ask with particular reference to the serious matters involving some of the students of the Immaculate Conception Seminary, which in November 2000 you were good enough to bring confidentially to the attention of the then-Apostolic Nuncio in the United States, the late Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo," Sandri wrote.

The New York priest, the Rev. James Boniface Ramsey, has said he wrote to the Vatican in 2000 -- when the late John Paul II headed the church -- about McCarrick's alleged misconduct with seminarians from Seton Hall University's Immaculate Conception Seminary in New Jersey. Ramsey, who was on the seminary faculty at the time, said he doesn't have a copy of the earlier letter.