Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Een paar jaar geleden was er een golf van verontwaardiging in Amerika
tegen misbruik door priesters, toen is dit niet aan bod gekomen.
Grote bedragen werden betaald als smartegeld en de lokale kerk werd
flink 'uitgekleed.'
Daarna was Europa aan de beurt, met vaak onthutsende onthullingen, die
nog steeds doorgaan.
En plots is vanuit Amerika het vizier gericht op de hoofdman.
De tijd is kennelijk rijp gemaakt.

Groet / Cees

March 24, 2010
Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/world/europe/25vatican.html
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not
defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though
several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on
the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly
unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church
officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their
highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is 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.

The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C.
Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to
1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by
bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still
the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full
canonical trials and defrocked.

In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the
case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After
eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal
Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the
Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to
Father Murphy’s dismissal.

But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally
wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on
trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that
the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.

“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of
my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal
Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files
contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.

The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to
keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, the 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 handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who
interviewed Father Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at
the Vatican.

Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s
own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors
who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and
interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were
told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents
show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.

Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by
Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in
northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working
freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a
juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.

Even as the pope himself in a recent letter to Irish Catholics has
emphasized the need to cooperate with civil justice in abuse cases, the
correspondence seems to indicate that the Vatican’s insistence on
secrecy has often impeded such cooperation. At the same time, the
officials’ reluctance to defrock a sex abuser shows that on a doctrinal
level, the Vatican has tended to view the matter in terms of sin and
repentance more than crime and punishment.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was shown the
documents and was asked to respond to questions about the case. He
provided a statement saying that Father Murphy had certainly violated
“particularly vulnerable” children and the law, and that it was a
“tragic case.” But he pointed out that the Vatican was not forwarded the
case until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated the case
and dropped it.

Father Lombardi emphasized that neither the Code of Canon Law nor the
Vatican norms issued in 1962, which instruct bishops to conduct
canonical investigations and trials in secret, prohibited church
officials from reporting child abuse to civil authorities. He did not
address why that had never happened in this case.

As to why Father Murphy was never defrocked, he said that “the Code of
Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties.” He said that Father
Murphy’s poor health and the lack of more recent accusations against him
were factors in the decision.

The Vatican’s inaction is not unusual. Only 20 percent of the 3,000
accused priests whose cases went to the church’s doctrinal office
between 2001 and 2010 were given full church trials, and only some of
those were defrocked, according to a recent interview in an Italian
newspaper with Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the chief internal prosecutor
at that office. An additional 10 percent were defrocked immediately. Ten
percent left voluntarily. But a majority — 60 percent — faced other
“administrative and disciplinary provisions,” Monsignor Scicluna said,
like being prohibited from celebrating Mass.

To many, Father Murphy appeared to be a saint: a hearing man gifted at
communicating in American Sign Language and an effective fund-raiser for
deaf causes. A priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, he started as a
teacher at St. John’s School for the Deaf, in St. Francis, in 1950. He
was promoted to run the school in 1963 even though students had
disclosed to church officials in the 1950s that he was a predator.

Victims give similar accounts of Father Murphy’s pulling down their
pants and touching them in his office, his car, his mother’s country
house, on class excursions and fund-raising trips and in their dormitory
beds at night. Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went
to Father Murphy for confession when he was about 12, in 1960.

“If he was a real mean guy, I would have stayed away,” said Mr.
Budzinski, now 61, who worked for years as a journeyman printer. “But he
was so friendly, and so nice and understanding. I knew he was wrong, but
I couldn’t really believe it.”

Mr. Budzinski and a group of other deaf former students spent more than
30 years trying to raise the alarm, including passing out leaflets
outside the Milwaukee cathedral. Mr. Budzinski’s friend Gary Smith said
in an interview that Father Murphy molested him 50 or 60 times, starting
at age 12. By the time he graduated from high school at St. John’s, Mr.
Smith said, “I was a very, very angry man.”

In 1993, with complaints about Father Murphy landing on his desk,
Archbishop Weakland hired a social worker specializing in treating
sexual offenders to evaluate him. After four days of interviews, the
social worker said that Father Murphy had admitted his acts, had
probably molested about 200 boys and felt no remorse.

However, it was not until 1996 that Archbishop Weakland tried to have
Father Murphy defrocked. The reason, he wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, was
to defuse the anger among the deaf and restore their trust in the
church. He wrote that since he had become aware that “solicitation in
the confessional might be part of the situation,” the case belonged at
the doctrinal office.

With no response from Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop Weakland wrote a
different Vatican office in March 1997 saying the matter was urgent
because a lawyer was preparing to sue, the case could become public and
“true scandal in the future seems very possible.”

Recently some bishops have argued that the 1962 norms dictating secret
disciplinary procedures have long fallen out of use. But it is clear
from these documents that in 1997, they were still in force.

But the effort to dismiss Father Murphy came to a sudden halt after the
priest appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency.

In an interview, Archbishop Weakland said that he recalled a final
meeting at the Vatican in May 1998 in which he failed to persuade
Cardinal Bertone and other doctrinal officials to grant a canonical
trial to defrock Father Murphy. (In 2002, Archbishop Weakland resigned
after it became public that he had an affair with a man and used church
money to pay him a settlement.)

Archbishop Weakland said this week in an interview, “The evidence was so
complete, and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the
lay state, and also that that would bring a certain amount of peace in
the deaf community.”

Father Murphy died four months later at age 72 and was buried in his
priestly vestments. Archbishop Weakland wrote a last letter to Cardinal
Bertone explaining his regret that Father Murphy’s family had disobeyed
the archbishop’s instructions that the funeral be small and private, and
the coffin kept closed.

“In spite of these difficulties,” Archbishop Weakland wrote, “we are
still hoping we can avoid undue publicity that would be negative toward
the church.”

Rachel Donadio contributed reporting from Rome.

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