VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio
[with audio]
Attorneys for the victim in a Wisconsin sex abuse case voluntarily withdrew a lawsuit against the Holy See on Friday, in which Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinals Tarcisio Bertone and Angelo Sodano, the Secretary of State and Secretary of State-emeritus, respectively, were named as defendants.
“I think it is enormously important that this case is not longer on the docket, because this was the case centred on revelations about Father Lawrence Murphy who allegedly abused almost 200 kids at a school for the deaf in the Milwaukee area from 1950 until 1974,” said John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter.
“This was the case that triggered the global media firestorm in early 2010 that led to a very incendiary front page piece in the New York Times suggesting that the Vatican and Pope Benedict had failed to respond aggressively to the crisis, and really did galvanize and shift public perceptions in very important ways,” he told Vatican Radio. “So that fact that this case has now in a sense died on the vine does mark the end of what has been a very important chapter in this story.”
Attorney for the Holy See, Jeffrey S. Lena called the original claim “outworn and discredited” in a statement released on Friday.
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