VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider
Story of the American pedophile priest closed before the District Court of Wisconsin: the complaints against Ratzinger, Bertone and Sodano have been withdrawn
Andrea Tornielli
Vatican City
It was the most emblematic and painful case which made the front page of The New York Times in March 2010, the annus horribilis of the pedophilia scandal: the case of Father Lawrence Murphy – a priest who from 1950 to 1974 worked in a school for deaf children of Milwaukee abusing hundreds of boys – ended Friday, February 10th before the District Court of Wisconsin. The complainants in the case «John Doe 16 v. Holy See» withdrew and did not want a final sentence of acquittal for the Pope and the Cardinals TarcisioBertone and Angelo Sodano, involved in the case for civil damages.
It is an important victory for the Holy See, represented by the lawyer Jeffrey Lena, and a defeat for Jeff Anderson, the owner of the legal firm who had tried, in this and other cases, to have the Vatican compensate victims of abuse. Anderson had tried to obtain jurisdiction over the Holy See and its hierarchies with a theory according to which the responsibility for the actions of an employee may fall not only on his employer (in this case, the diocese of Milwaukee), but also on the Holy See because the Pope can name -and thus, in theory, control – the bishops throughout the world. According to this theory, whoever controls the «employer» must also be responsible for the actions of the worker.
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