Vatican Axed Trial of U.S. Priest Accused of Molesting 200 Deaf Boys
Vatican City » The Vatican on Thursday strongly defended its decision not to defrock an American priest accused of molesting about 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin and denounced what it called a campaign to smear Pope Benedict XVI and his aides.
Church and Vatican documents showed that in the mid-1990s, two Wisconsin bishops urged the Vatican office led by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now the pope — to let them hold a church trial against the Rev. Lawrence Murphy. The bishops admitted the trial was coming years after the alleged abuse, but argued that the deaf community in Milwaukee was demanding justice from the church.
This scandal just keeps inching closer and closer to the Pope. Why would anyone still have any allegiance to the Catholic Church?
Despite the extensive and grave allegations against Murphy, Ratzinger’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ruled that the alleged molestation had occurred too long ago and that Murphy — then ailing and elderly — should instead repent and be restricted from celebrating Mass outside of his diocese.
The official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone — now the Vatican’s secretary of state — ordered the church trial halted after Murphy wrote Ratzinger a letter saying he was ill, infirm, and “simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood.”
The New York Times broke the story Thursday, adding fuel to a swirling scandal about the way the Vatican in general, and Benedict in particular, have handled reports of priests raping children over the years.
On Thursday, a group of Americans who say they were sexually abused by clerics staged a press conference outside St. Peter’s Square in Rome to denounce Benedict’s handling of the case and gave reporters church and Vatican documents on the case.
Afterward, Italian police detained four Americans for 2½ hours because they didn’t have a permit for the news conference.
“We’ve spent more time in the police station than Father Murphy did in his life,” Peter Isely, the Milwaukee-based director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said after his release.
Speaking at the earlier press conference, Isely called the Murphy case the most “incontrovertible case of pedophilia you could get.”
“The goal of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was to keep this secret,” he said, flanked by photos of others who say they were abused. “We need to know why he [the pope] did not let us know about him [Murphy] and why he didn’t let the police know about him and why he did not condemn him and why he did not take his collar away from him.”
The Vatican issued a strong defense in its handling of the Murphy case. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said there was no cover-up and denounced what it said was a “clear and despicable intention” to strike at Benedict “at any cost.”
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, issued a statement noting that the Murphy case had only reached the Vatican in 1996 — about 20 years after the diocese first learned of the allegations. He also said Murphy died two years later — in 1998 — and that there was nothing in the church’s handling of the matter that precluded any civil action from being taken against him.
In fact, police did investigate the allegations at the time and never proceeded with a case, Lombardi noted. He said in the statement that a lack of more recent allegations was a factor in the decision not to defrock Murphy and noted that “the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties.”
Murphy worked at the former St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis from 1950 to 1975. His alleged victims were not limited to the deaf boys’ school. Donald Marshall, 45, of West Allis, Wis., said he was abused by Murphy when he was a teenager at a juvenile detention center in Irma in northern Wisconsin.
“I haven’t stepped in a church for some 20 years. I lost all faith in the church,” he said Thursday. “These predators are preying on God’s children. How can they even stand up at the pulpit and preach the word of God?”