A reignited child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is spreading around the globe, and a flash point in Wisconsin is flaring in the Vatican, where Pope Benedict XVI is under fire from critics who say he was part of a shameful culture of denial. It is the Wisconsin case of the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, who is accused of abusing as many as 200 boys at a Catholic school for the deaf near Milwaukee, that is implicating then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in what critics say is a church pattern of moving pedophile priests from parish to parish and diocese to diocese to dodge public outrage and protect child sex abusers from criminal prosecution.
The handling of Murphy’s case at the highest echelons of the church was revealed in documents released as part of a series of lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.
The case, and the pattern of behavior critics say it typifies, reaches to Madison. One of Murphy’s victims, Steven Geier, lives in the city today. And the Madison Diocese has its own roster of ignoble priests who have been identified as child molesters.
Some of their cases are now before the Vatican office that investigates sexual misconduct that Ratzinger headed before his elevation to pope in 2005.
Speculation over what the man who would become pope knew, and when, has critics charging that a practice of secrecy, denial and protecting child molesters was institutionalized at the highest levels of the church. The resulting firestorm has sent church officials across the world — including Madison’s Bishop Robert Morlino — rushing to the pope’s defense.
At least one local Catholic sees proof that the church is being singled out unfairly for a crime that infects all walks of life.
But the renewed scandal has supporters of a bill that would make it easier for Wisconsin victims of child sex abusers to sue their perpetrators hoping the heat of publicity will spur passage of the legislation. That, they say, would bring justice to the victims and expose perpetrators who have not yet been identified.
A series of articles in the New York Times late last month focused on the pope’s handling of child sex abuse allegations against priests when he was an archbishop in Germany in the 1970s, and from 1981 to 2005, when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that determines whether to bring accused priests to canonical trial. That office’s handling in 1996 of an investigation of Murphy was revealed in documents released as part of lawsuits brought by four of his victims.
The Milwaukee Archdiocese first acknowledged in 2004 that there were substantiated accusations of child sex abuse against the priest. Ratzinger’s top aide, church documents disclosed, halted a planned canonical trial after Murphy wrote Ratzinger protesting that he was in poor health and had repented, the Times reported. Files contained no response to Murphy from Ratzinger.
The revelations of the church’s actions are terribly important, says Peter Isely, Midwest coordinator for SNAP — Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests — an advocacy group that has worked vigorously to expose abusing priests and church actions to shelter them. “It shows protection of clerical sex offenders was something that existed throughout the church. It goes to the highest level of the church and is part of the systematic way they operated.”
Some details revealed in the documents are chilling. For example, says Isely, before the order to halt, officials were preparing for a special canonical trial because Murphy was accused of soliciting sex from boys in the confessional, the booth where Catholics confess their sins to a priest and seek absolution.
“This is as heinous as it gets,” says Isely.
But the media, and others, are rushing to judgment, say defenders of the pope. Madison’s Bishop Morlino says it was church officials in Milwaukee, not the Vatican, who controlled what happened with Murphy.
“It is clear that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which Cardinal Ratzinger was then at the head, had nothing to do with the criminal case of the sickening abuse by Fr. Lawrence Murphy of several young deaf men,” Morlino wrote last week in an exchange of e-mails with The Capital Times, which the diocese posted on its website.
It was not until 2001 that the Vatican office took over investigation of priests accused of sexual abuse of children.
Those cases were previously handled by local dioceses, the former judicial officer of the Milwaukee Archdiocese writes in a Catholic newspaper in response to recent media coverage of the Murphy case.
At the time he died in 1998, Murphy was the subject of an active investigation in preparation for a canonical trial, says the Rev. Thomas Brundage.
Placing responsibility for the handling of Murphy’s case at the pope’s feet is “a huge leap of logic and information,” he says.
Although no charges were filed, complaints about Murphy were brought to police in 1973, the same year allegations of sexual misconduct against him were brought to the archdiocese, according to information posted by the Milwaukee Archdiocese on its website.
Murphy was removed as director of St. John’s School in St. Francis the following year, and he moved to the Diocese of Superior where he began an “informal assignment” in Boulder Junction that continued until 1993 when he retired and admitted sexual contact with children at St. John’s, according to the archdiocese.
The case was sent to the Vatican only because of the allegations involving the administration of the sacrament of confession, Morlino says in an e-mail.
It doesn’t matter how transparent the church is, its critics will not be satisfied, the bishop insists.
“The sense that I get, from media stories, from the blogs, from calls to my own office, is that there are some who are not interested at all in the full truth, but who already have decided that the then-Cardinal Ratzinger had some hand in an immense ‘conspiracy to cover up crime,’ Morlino says.
It’s undeniable that the pope is under fire across the globe. An advocate for victims in Ireland this week called the protection of offending priests at the expense of children a “deliberate policy,” despite a letter of apology from the pope for past abuses, including a decades-long pattern of molestation and cover-up at church-run schools that lit a furor when revealed nearly a year ago.
The pope met in March with the top archbishop in Germany after a widening sex scandal there that a lay church leader called “one of the worst crises we’ve seen in the Catholic Church.”
Church leaders in areas not now in the throes of the scandal tended to speak in support of the pope. Cardinals in Italy, Poland and Austria, for example, took the opportunity of the church’s most sacred season, Easter, to defend him.
In Madison, Bishop Morlino did not speak of the scandal at a solemn Good Friday service at St. Patrick’s Church on East Main Street. But outside afterward, some parishioners said they were appalled at more stories of abuse, although they support the church’s response.
“When I saw the news stories I was pretty concerned, but when I read the diocese’s response, I felt much better,” says Shelley, a Madison woman who did not give her last name. She was referring to Morlino’s posted responses to interview questions.
“I’ll tell you what, though, anyone who does that to a child is a criminal. The church has no place for them and they have no place in the church. It’s tricky, who had responsibility at the time gets very tricky, very specific — I don’t understand it fully. But I was interested in what the diocese had to say.”
Syte Reitz says she condemns child abuse, but thinks the eagerness with which news media outlets jump on reports of priest sex abuse show they are singling out the church to undercut its moral authority in society. Priests in fact offend against children less often than other groups, she says. The instinct to take care of such incidences within the “family” is perhaps not right, but a human instinct. “No one is immune from that,” she says. What’s more, officials dealing with these cases decades ago did not understand sexual disorders as well as they are generally understood today.
“People were ignorant. Nobody knew these people could not be rehabilitated,” Reitz says.
The fact that it is a Wisconsin legal case that is casting the scrutiny on the Vatican is remarkable, because for more than a decade, the courthouse doors were closed to most adult victims of child sex abuse seeking a civil remedy through a lawsuit.
One reason is the state’s statute of limitations that sets a deadline for how long after the abuse a lawsuit can be filed.
In addition, a mid-1990s decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court says that if courts get in the business of deciding whether the church was negligent in supervising its priests, they may cross the constitutional line separating church and state. Justices have criticized this ruling in subsequent cases, but it still stands.
State Rep. Joe Parisi, D-Madison, is a sponsor of the Child Victim Act, the latest in a series of attempts to give a day in court to child sex abuse victims, who frequently neither report the abuse nor realize the depth of its impact for many years.
Under current law, victims of child sex abuse may sue their abusers until age 35, a limit that has been eased several times since clergy sex abuse came to wide attention in the mid-1990s. The Child Victims Act would remove any statute of limitations on civil actions by minor victims of sex abuse by an adult.
The Assembly version passed out of committee last fall, although a Senate version has not advanced. Parisi says he hopes the bill will make it through the Assembly by the Legislature’s April 22 adjournment.
Every day of new allegations about the Catholic Church’s practices of shielding offenders improves its chances, he says.
Victims of clergy sex abuse who have “aged out” under the current law would then have the opportunity to seek justice, he says. In addition, Parisi points out, lawsuits in other states have led to discovery of church documents that reveal other perpetrators.
“There are still people out there that we don’t know about. This would be one more tool to discover information and make the names public to help stop abuse of other children.”
The statue of limitations in Wisconsin, more restrictive than that of many other states, has caused courts to dismiss many lawsuits by plaintiffs claiming they were damaged as children by priests who molested them.
They include a lawsuit brought against the Rev. Kenneth Klubertanz of the Madison Diocese in 2003, claiming the priest molested a 13-year-old in 1969 or 1970.
He is one of three priests against whom allegations of child sexual abuse have been made since Morlino became bishop of Madison in 2003, and since a 2002 edict from national church officials that each diocese develop a system to investigate every claim of sexual misconduct by a priest.
The Madison Diocese has identified four other priest abusers from earlier years.
Allegations of child sex abuse against Klubertanz were found credible after a canonical trial in 2007, as were charges of child sex abuse against the Rev. J. Gibbs Clauder in 2009.
A determination in charges of child sex abuse against the Rev. Gerald Vosen, made in 2004, has not yet been resolved, the Madison Diocese said last week.
Murphy’s sexual assaults of the St. John’s boys now suing the Milwaukee Archdiocese go back as far as the 1960s, but the case is still alive in a Wisconsin court because of a claim developed by Jeff Anderson, the Minnesota attorney representing them.
The men are claiming that the archdiocese defrauded them because officials knew of past abuse by Murphy but continued to give him unsupervised access to children.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court, in a 2007 ruling in another case, ruled that claims of such fraud could be brought against the church and that the clock on those claims would start running when plaintiffs realize or should have realized that the church’s alleged fraud was the cause of their injuries.
Proving that claim of fraud hinges on who knew what — and when.
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