Pope overlooked child abuse, files show
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Pontiff among Vatican officials who failed to act after priest admitted molesting boys
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 UNITED STATES
The New York Times
Mar 26, 2010 |
Top Vatican officials – including the future Pope Benedict – did not defrock a priest who molested up to 200 deaf boys, according to files unearthed as part of a lawsuit.
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the current pontiff, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.
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The documents emerged with the Pope facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.
In the wake of the latest revelations, four American victims of clergy sexual abuse say they were detained and questioned by Italian police in Rome after protesting at the Vatican.
Barbara Blaine, one of the victims, said officers told them a judge would decide if they would be charged. The four leaders of the US-based Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests demanded that the Pope open up files on paedophile Catholic clerics and immediately defrock all “predator priests”.
The Wisconsin case involved the Reverend Lawrence Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. It is one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that decides whether accused priests should be defrocked, led from 1981 to 2005 by Ratzinger.
In 1996, Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time.
After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office – then cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state – instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Murphy’s dismissal. But he halted the process after Murphy wrote to Ratzinger protesting that he had repented and was in poor health.
“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Murphy wrote to Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Ratzinger.
The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The documents include letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Murphy and minutes of a final meeting at the Vatican.
Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told of Murphy sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.
Instead of being disciplined, Milwaukee’s then archbishop William Cousins moved Murphy to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children. He died in 1998, still a priest.
Even as the Pope in a recent letter to Irish Catholics emphasised the need to co-operate with civil justice in abuse cases, the correspondence seems to indicate that the Vatican’s insistence on secrecy has often impeded such co-operation.
The Vatican spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, provided a statement saying Murphy had violated “particularly vulnerable” children and the law, and that it was a “tragic case”. But he said the Vatican was not forwarded the case until 1996, years after civil officials had investigated.
Lombardi said that in the late 1990s, the morals watchdog suggested the Milwaukee archbishop take action by “restricting Father Murphy’s public ministry and requiring that Father Murphy accept full responsibility for the gravity of his acts”.
It was delegated to the archbishop “in light of the facts that Father Murphy was elderly and in very poor health, and that he was living in seclusion and no allegations of abuse had been reported in over 20 years”.
He did not address why church officials never reported the abuse to civil authorities in this case. As to why Murphy was never defrocked, he said: “The code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties.”
To many, Murphy appeared to be a saint: a hearing man gifted at communicating in American sign language and an effective fund-raiser for deaf causes. He started as a teacher at St John’s School for the Deaf in St Francis in 1950 and was promoted to run it in 1963, even though students disclosed to church officials in the 1950s that he was a predator.
Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went to Murphy for confession when he was about 12, in 1960. “He was so friendly, and so nice and understanding. I knew he was wrong, but I couldn’t really believe it.” Budzinski and other deaf former students spent more than 30 years trying to raise the alarm.
In 1993, with complaints about Murphy landing on his desk, Weakland hired a social worker to evaluate him. After four days, the social worker said Murphy admitted his acts, had probably molested about 200 boys and felt no remorse.
Additional reporting by Associated Press, Agence France-Presse
