By Brian Kates
New York Daily News
April 23, 2010
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/04/23/2010-04-23_milwaukee_lawsuit_against_pope_benedict_claims_catholic_church_covered_up_priest.html
An Illinois man has filed a federal lawsuit against the Vatican claiming top Catholic church leaders called off punishment of the priest accused of sexually abusing boys at a Wisconsin school for the deaf.
The suit, filed Thursday in Milwaukee federal court, claims top leaders at the Vatican knew about allegations of sexual abuse at St. John's School for the Deaf but took no steps to discipline the accused priest, the Rev. Lawrence Murphy.
The lawsuit is the latest development in the burgeoning priest sex abuse scandal that has reached from the lowest levels of the church to the highest strata of the Vatican, including the Pope himself.
Key evidence in the suit is a newly disclosed 1995 letter from one of Murphy's alleged victims to then Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Angelo Sodano detailing the problems at St. John's, the Associated Press reported.
It was written a year before it was first believed the case was brought to the attention of the Vatican.
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| Pope Benedict XVI is being sued in a U.S. court over the preist abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church. |
Sodano has been a strong defender of Pope Benedict XVI's handling of the global clergy sexual abuse crisis.
He also has been accused in U.S. Catholic publications and elsewhere of stalling a Vatican probe of the Rev. Marcial Maciel, the discredited founder of the Legionaries of Christ. The order has admitted that the now-deceased Maciel fathered at least one child and molested young seminarians.
Before the disclosure of the Sodano letter, it was believed the Vatican first learned of sex-abuse allegations against Murphy in a July 1996 letter from Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland.
That letter was sent to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the powerful Vatican office then led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected pope in 2005.
Murphy, who died in 1998, was accused of sexually abusing some 200 boys at the deaf school from 1950 to 1974. He was put on a leave of absence when the allegations were revealed in the early 1970s. The lawsuit claims Murphy was still allowed to serve in ministry and work with children in another Wisconsin diocese into the early 1990s.
The lawsuit was filed by Minnesota-based attorney Jeff Anderson, who also has a pending lawsuit against the Vatican in Oregon for a man who claims he was abused at his Catholic school in the 1960s.
The Vatican has "been hiding behind legal shields, and we have been successful so far in the courts in cracking those shields," Anderson said. "We intend to use this case and others like it to wedge open those cracks."
He said the plaintiff had pledged to donate any monetary award to a fund to be shared by Murphy's victims.
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| Peter Isely, a spokesman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, speaks about the suit outside the Milwaukee courthouse Thursday. |
The suit aims to prove the Vatican is a global business empire, engaged in "commercial activity" in Wisconsin and across the U.S. and holding "unqualified power" over each diocese, parish and follower.
The Vatican's U.S.-based attorney, Jeffrey Lena, dismissed the suit as a publicity stunt that rehashes theories already rejected by U.S. courts.
Other legal experts also cast doubt on the suit's legal underpinning.
"He's alleging an employment relationship between individual priests and the Holy See," said Nicholas Cafardi, a canon lawyer and former dean of Duquesne University School of Law. "I'm sorry, but diocesan priests in the United States are not employees of the Holy See."
Villanova University law Prof. Joseph Dellapenna said he doubts courts will treat the Wisconsin diocese as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Vatican. He noted a number of dioceses around the country have filed for bankruptcy because of abuse cases, and the courts have treated them as separate, independent entities.
But Washington, D.C., attorney Jonathan Levy, an international law specialist who has tried suing the Vatican Bank over Holocaust claims, told the AP that Anderson could succeed in taking advantage of exceptions to sovereign immunity.
"I'd say he's got some new and exciting theories in there why the Vatican should be held responsible for its bad acts," Levy said.
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