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  Pope Allegedly Knew about Wis. Pedophile Priest

By Dana Kennedy
AOL News
March 26, 2010

http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/pope-allegedly-knew-about-wisc-pedophile-priest/19414010

Photos of Pope Benedict XVI and the Rev. Lawrence Murphy are displayed at a press conference Thursday at the Vatican. Abuse allegations against Murphy were brought to the pope's attention when he was a cardinal; documents suggests he took no action.

Just days after Pope Benedict XVI chastised Irish bishops for covering up clerical sexual abuse in Ireland, new documents suggest he did nothing to discipline a Wisconsin priest he knew had molested scores of deaf boys -- and may have blocked a church trial in the case.

In 1996, when then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was serving in one of the Vatican's most important positions, he received written warnings from several bishops about the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, a priest at St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wis., The New York Times reported. The Times obtained the internal church documents from lawyers of five victims of Murphy, who are suing the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

"This shows a direct line from the victims through the bishops and directly to the man who is now pope," Jeff Anderson, one of the lawyers, told AOL News reporter Lisa Holewa in Milwaukee. "The only difference [from the 1950s] is now we have the documents that are open to secular eyes."

The abuse of what may have been up to 200 deaf boys, many who reported cowering in their beds weeping while Murphy, the school's powerful priest, molested others, was first reported in 2006 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Murphy worked at the school from 1950 to 1974.

Milwaukee's then-archbishop, Rembert G. Weakland, wrote Ratzinger two letters in 1996 about Murphy's behavior and got no response, the Times reported. His case was only one of thousands forwarded to Ratzinger from 1981 to 2005, when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which decides whether priests will be defrocked.

Eight months after receiving the letters, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican's secretary of state, told Wisconsin bishops to start a secret canonical trial that might have ended with Murphy's dismissal.

However, Bertone called off the trial after Murphy appealed to Ratzinger directly. The priest claimed poor health and said the abuse no longer fell within the church's statute of limitations.

"I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood," Murphy wrote. "I ask your kind assistance in this matter." The Times reported that there are no responses from Ratzinger in the files.

Church observers say that for the pope, these allegations could be the most damaging yet in a string of allegations about official inaction and cover-ups regarding clerical sexual abuse.

"What's coming out now has just never happened before on this scale and with links to the pope," said Terry McKiernan, head of Bishops Accountability, a Catholic sexual abuse watchdog group. "This is a very scary time for the Vatican. There's never been this level of craziness to deal with in Rome. They are a very closed shop; [that] used to work for them, but may now be isolating them."

In a statement today, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said, "Father Murphy violated the law and, more importantly, the sacred trust that his victims had placed in him."

Lombardi said that while a judgment in such cases can lead to defrocking, by the time Murphy's case was brought to the Vatican's attention he was "elderly and in very poor health ... living in seclusion, and no allegations of abuse had been reported in over 20 years."

Exactly when or how a fuller response to the allegations will emerge from the Vatican is unclear. Peter Borre, who heads the Council of Parishes, a group representing 68 U.S. parishes that have canon appeals pending at the Vatican, calls the Vatican a "classic stovepipe operation," where information is jealously guarded by a few top officials and no one wants to share what they know with anyone else.

"Everything happens there behind closed doors, and only an extremely small group of basically very elderly, mostly white men know what's going on," Borre said. "It's not dissimilar to any top-level intelligence community where one component would rather throw their own mother under a bus rather than share information."

Borre said the Vatican has always had an "us against them attitude" when it comes to any criticism of it, and dismisses the media as biased and heathen.

"The first school of thought when the Vatican deals with a crisis [is] 'us against them,'" Borre said. "But now there's a second school of thought, which is 'that's not going to work anymore, Charlie.'"

This latest black eye for the Vatican comes one day after the pope accepted the resignation of Irish Bishop John Magee for his part in covering up clerical sexual abuse in Ireland. Just days before, the pope wrote a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics, blaming clergy there for the massive scandals.

Pope Benedict has not commented on reports that as an archbishop in Germany from 1977 to 1982, he went easy on a priest in his diocese known to have sexually abused children.

 
 

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