Fr. Lawrence Murphy

UPDATE, April 22, 2010: Murphy assault victim sues Pope Benedict in Milwaukee federal court.
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This Sunday is Palm Sunday.

Catholics are beginning their observance of Holy Week.

What does that mean?

It's time for those interested in smearing the Church to step up their efforts.

Leftist media outlets often do stories that attack Christians and Christianity during this holiest time of the year for believers.

For example, last year, Ed Meacham, Newsweek, recognized Holy Week with this cover story: "The End of Christian America."

Groups like Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) get extra busy, too.

Stories that put the Church in a bad light abound.

This year, we have the story of the abuses of Fr. Lawrence Murphy, a priest who molested up to 200 boys during the 1950s through the 1970s at St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisconsin.

An additional punch: Critics are holding Pope Benedict XVI directly responsible for failing to defrock Murphy when the case was brought to the attention of the Vatican in 1996.

Note: I'm disgusted that the media and activist groups exploit Holy Week like this. It happens every year. However, that disgust pales in comparison to my disgust for the abusive priests and the failure of the Church hierarchy to treat them as criminals.

As a Catholic, I am sickened by how the cases of child sexual abuse by priests in the Milwaukee Archdiocese were handled by the Church. It makes me ill.

The New York Times has the story.

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.

The Times paints the liberal and the disgraced Archbishop Rembert Weakland as eventually trying to do the right thing, but his efforts were in vain.

What a great guy, struggling to protect children and prevent further abuse!

Sure.

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.”

...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.”

The New York Times does acknowledge that Weakland had a scandal of his own, but it's just mentioned in passing, almost as an afterthought, as if it's insignificant.

Weakland paid his former lover nearly $500,000 in hush money. That's huge. As a member of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, that's my money. I paid to keep Weakland's paramour, Paul Marcoux, quiet. Needless to say, Marcoux didn't stay quiet.

The story also leaves out the disgraceful way Weakland dealt with many of the sexual abuse case. He was no champion of the abuse victims at all.

In his memoir, Weakland wrote, "We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature."

That is impossible for me to believe. The brilliant Weakland didn't know that molesting children was a crime? The brilliant Weakland didn't know that molesting children was a criminal offense.

Yeah, right.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The Vatican on Thursday defended its decision not to defrock a Wisconsin priest accused of sexually assaulting as many as 200 deaf boys from the 1950s to the 1970s and denounced what it called a "despicable" attempt to smear Pope Benedict XVI and his aides.

But Wisconsin advocates for victims of clergy sex abuse suggested the Vatican's handling of the case involving Father Lawrence Murphy - and revelations on similar cases in Europe - provide evidence of an institutional coverup that spanned decades and continents.

"We are finally able to get this where we believe it belongs, and that's at the Vatican's doorstep," Mark Salmon of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said at a Thursday morning news conference outside the Archdiocese of Milwaukee's headquarters.

More:

"He likes to position himself as a critic of the Vatican, the one bishop who stood up to challenge the system," SNAP Midwest Director Peter Isely said of Weakland, in releasing the documents outside the archdiocese's Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist.

"He never once stood up against the system when it came to the molestation and rape of boys" by Murphy at St. John School for the Deaf in St. Francis, where Murphy worked for two decades, Isely said.

That doesn't seem to fit with the New York Times account, does it?

Weakland is no hero.

I also think that it's a stretch to blame Pope Benedict for how things were handled in the Milwaukee Archdiocese.

What boggles my mind is why the victims' parents didn't call police. How could hundreds of acts of molestation go unreported? It surprises me that not one parent went to police to report the rape of his or her child. Not one!

Or if a parent did report it to civil authorities, did police ignore the crime?

I don't know why it took so many decades for the abuse to be revealed to the public.

The sexual assault of a child is a crime. The person who committed the act is a criminal and deserves to be punished. This isn't a gray area.

SNAP's goal is clear as well. I think the group equates justice for victims with taking down the Catholic Church.

"We are finally able to get this where we believe it belongs, and that's at the Vatican's doorstep," Mark Salmon of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said at a Thursday morning news conference outside the Archdiocese of Milwaukee's headquarters.

In this case, justice looks more like revenge to me.

Video, FOX 6 News.