POPE BENEDICT XVI failed to respond to pleas from a US bishop for guidance in dealing with a paedophile priest in 1996.Disciplinary proceedings against the same priest were interrupted two years later, after the priest appealed to Benedict, who was then a cardinal, the New York Times revealed yesterday .
“Will they bring down the pope?” the television network CNN asked in reporting the story.
According to documents provided to the New York Times by the lawyers of five men who are suing the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Fr Lawrence Murphy sexually abused approximately 200 boys at a school for the deaf where he taught and was then director between 1950 and 1974.
Many of the victims complained, going so far as to pass out leaflets in front of Milwaukee cathedral, but they were ignored by police, prosecutors and three successive archbishops.
In affidavits, Fr Murphy’s victims recounted how the priest undressed them and fondled them in his office and car, in the confessional, at his mother’s house and in their dormitory beds at night.
Fr Murphy was reportedly a skilled fundraiser with a gift for communicating with the deaf through sign language.
In 1974, Fr Murphy was transferred to the Diocese of Superior, in northern Wisconsin. Until his death 24 years later, Fr Murphy worked in schools, parishes and a juvenile detention centre, where he is also accused of abusing a boy. At his funeral in 1998, he was laid out in priestly vestments.
Two years earlier, Archbishop Rembert Weakland alerted the Vatican to Fr Murphy’s record, in two letters addressed to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church’s disciplinary body, from 1981 until 2005.
Having received no response, Dr Weakland sent an urgent message to the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s high court, in March 1997, asking for guidance because one of Fr Murphy’s victims was about to initiate a lawsuit.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was then Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, and is today the Vatican’s secretary of state – the equivalent of a prime minister – instructed Dr Weakland to begin secret disciplinary proceedings against Fr Murphy.
But Cardinal Bertone backtracked after Fr Murphy wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger pleading for mercy because he was old, ill and had repented.
“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Fr Murphy wrote.
There is no record of a response from Cardinal Ratzinger, but Cardinal Bertone asked the diocese to stop the process and instead use only “pastoral measures”, such as preventing Fr Murphy from celebrating Mass outside his home diocese.
In a breakfast meeting yesterday, Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, one of Pope Benedict’s top aides, denounced a “conspiracy” against the church.
Reuters news agency quoted Cardinal Martins saying that he favoured zero tolerance now, but that, “we should not be too scandalised if some bishops knew about it but kept it secret. This is what happens in every family; you don’t wash your dirty laundry in public,” he said.
Fr Federico Lombardi, the pope’s spokesman, issued a statement noting that US civil authorities had dropped their investigation of Fr Murphy, and that allegations were 20 years old by the time the Vatican heard of them.
Meanwhile, four Americans from the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests (Snap) handed out documentation on the case at a press conference outside the Vatican.
“The goal of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was to keep this secret,” said Peter Isely, the Milwaukee-based director of Snap.
“This is the most incontrovertible case of paedophilia you could get. We need to know why [the pope] did not let us know about [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.”
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