Associated Press

27 March 2010

(AP)

ROME — Three deaf men who say they were repeatedly sodomized and abused by priests as children confronted an Italian church diocese Friday about why it hasn't punished their abusers, saying they want justice.

The three men, first interviewed last year by The Associated Press, appeared on a prime-time talk show on Italy's state-run RAI TV, squaring off with the spokesman of the Verona diocese amid a swirling global sex abuse scandal that has inched closer to Pope Benedict XVI.

The spokesman, the Rev. Bruno Fasani, said he hoped the confrontation would be constructive and he welcomed meeting the men for the first time. But the former students of Verona's Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf refused to shake his hand during the show.

One of the three, Dario Laiti, 59, said he couldn't bring himself to greet the prelate.

"It's a problem of justice," said Laiti, who has said he was sodomized repeatedly at the boarding school from the age of seven. Earlier in the day, in an interview with Associated Press Television News, Laiti said he wanted his abusers kicked out of the church.

"We want justice for everything we went through, the suffering for all of our life," said Gianni Bisoli, 61, another former student who says he was sodomized by and forced to perform oral sex on a dozen priests at the institute.

Bisoli, Laiti and 65 other former pupils signed a statement last year saying sexual abuse, pedophilia and corporal punishment occurred at the school from the 1950s to the 1980s.

While not all acknowledged being victims, 14 of the 67 wrote sworn statements and made videotapes, detailing abuse they suffered, some for years, at the hands of priests and brothers of the Congregation for the Company of Mary. They named 24 priests, brothers and lay religious men. Bisoli also accused the late bishop of Verona of assaulting him.

The current bishop of Verona, Monsignor Giuseppe Zenti, initially accused the former students of lying and trying to blackmail him because they were involved in a real estate dispute with the diocese. However, after one of the accused lay religious men admitted to sexual relations with students, the bishop ordered an internal investigation. It found some abuse occurred, albeit a fraction of what had been alleged.

Advocates for the victims, however, said the diocese investigation was fatally flawed because no one interviewed the former students.

Fasani insisted Friday on RAI that the diocese had no solid complaint, with a named victim, to go on from the former students.

The students' spokesman, Marco Lodi Rizzini, disputed that, saying the diocese knew well who they were since they had met several times with the bishop and other diocesan officials and that 53 former students had already complained to the diocese of alleged abuse.

Last summer, the diocese forwarded its files to the Vatican office that prosecutes sex crimes by clergy, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was headed for years by the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now pope, who issued a 2001 directive that requires bishops to report suspected clerical abuse cases to the Vatican, but makes no mention of calling police.

The Vatican studied the file but took no action until Feb. 15, when Cardinal William Levada instructed Zenti to interview the former students to determine if any action should be taken against the priests.

New York Times

26 March 2010

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and DAVID CALLENDER

They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people.

This week, they learned that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, received letters about Father Murphy in 1996 from Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, who said that the deaf community needed “a healing response from the Church.” The Vatican sat on the case, then equivocated, and when Father Murphy died in 1998, he died a priest.

“That man should have been in prison for a very long time, but he was lucky,” Steven Geier, one of Father Murphy’s victims, said Thursday. “What about me? I wasn’t supposed to touch girls. What gave him the right to be able to do that? Father Murphy constantly thought about sex with children, and he got away with it.”

Young victims of sexual abuse are often so confused, ashamed or traumatized that they wait years to report the violations. Some never say a word. One of the remarkable aspects of the Father Murphy case is that young victims began alerting the authorities in the mid-1950s, when sexual abuse was hardly even a part of the public vocabulary.

In his ranch house in Madison, where he lives with his wife, Ann, and two dachshunds, Mr. Geier said through an interpreter that he entered St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wis., when he was 9. His father had helped build a Catholic church in rural Dane County, and his aunt was a nun. His family wanted him to get a good education in a Catholic school.

Mr. Geier, now 59, said that between the ages of 14 and 15, starting around 1965, Father Murphy molested him four times in a closet at the school. The priest, a hearing man fluent in sign language, said that God wanted him to teach the boy about sex but that he had to keep it quiet because it was under the sacrament of confession. Mr. Geier said he felt sick.

“First thing in the morning,” Mr. Geier said, “we took communion, and as he passed out the communion wafers, I thought about how many boys did he touch with those hands and all of the germs, all of the filth of his hands.”

Father Murphy may have molested as many as 200 boys while he worked at the school from 1950 to 1974, according to the accounts of victims and a social worker hired by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to interview him.

Mr. Geier said he first tried to tell the priest at his home parish in Madison, where he served as an altar boy, in 1966 when he was just 16. But the priest, he said, told him he did not want to hear about it, and to just forget about it. He told another priest while he was still a teenager, and yet a third priest years later, after he married.

That priest, the Rev. Tom Schroeder, 72, who led Masses for the deaf in Madison from 1970 to 1992, said in an interview Friday that he remembered Mr. Geier’s telling him about Father Murphy. Father Schroeder said that he told a nun, who told another nun who was a dormitory supervisor at St. John’s, but that the supervisor did not believe it and nothing ever came of it.

“I assumed that if enough people told her, she would finally believe it,” Father Schroeder said.

Internal church correspondence unearthed in a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and given to The New York Times, which made it public it this week, included a letter from the Rev. David Walsh, who served as a chaplain for the deaf in Chicago, saying that teenage students at St. John’s had told him in the late 1950s about Father Murphy’s abuse.

Father Walsh said he told Archbishop Albert Gregory Meyer of Milwaukee, who sent Father Murphy on a retreat and then put him back in the school to undo “the harm he had done.”

In the 1970s, a group of former students who were in a vocational rehabilitation program in Milwaukee began telling their hearing supervisors about Father Murphy, a sequence of events reported in two articles in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2006.