Vatican attacks media on 'Pope role' in sex abuse cases   

Victim Arthur Budzinski says Vatican members knew about the scandal 

BBC News

26 March 2010

The Vatican has attacked the media over charges that the Pope failed to act against a US priest accused of abusing up to 200 deaf boys two decades ago.

A Vatican newspaper editorial said the claims were an "ignoble" attack on the Pope and that there was no "cover-up".

The head of the UK Catholic church said the Pope had made important changes to the way abuse was dealt with.

The Catholic church has been hit by a series of allegations in Europe and the US over the past months.

The latest allegations stem from the US, after it emerged that Archbishops had complained in 1996 about a priest, Fr Lawrence Murphy. Their complaints went to a Vatican office led by the future Pope Benedict XVI, but apparently received no response.

One victim told the BBC the Pope had known of a cover-up "for many years".

Arthur Budzinski, now 61, said Pope Benedict should confess about what he knew.

He said through an interpreter: "It goes all the way up to him - he was in charge of these types of cases."

The recent allegations against the Catholic Church echo paedophilia scandals that rocked the institution in America eight years ago.

Allegations of the abuse of deaf children have also resurfaced in Italy, where interviews with several victims were due to be broadcast on national television on Friday.

At least 14 former pupils at the Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf in the northern city of Verona say they were abused between the 1950s and the 1980s.

They complained to local Church authorities as early as 2008.

The diocese of Verona said this week that it intends to interview the victims following a request from the Vatican to do so.

And in a separate case, the Legionaries of Christ, an ultra-Conservative congregation within Catholicism, condemned the "reprehensible" actions of their Mexican founder, the late Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, who sexually abused a number of children in the 1940s and 1950s.

'No cover-up'

Fr Murphy is suspected of abusing some 200 boys at St John's School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin, between 1950 and 1974.

 According to Church documents, an archbishop wrote in 1996 to a Vatican morals watchdog led by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to complain about Fr Murphy.

A canonical trial was authorised by the future pope's deputy, but was later halted, despite objections from a second archbishop.

Fr Murphy had written to Cardinal Ratzinger saying he was ill and wanted to live out his life in the "dignity of my priesthood".

The Pope's official spokesman, Federico Lombardi, said the Murphy case had only reached the Vatican in 1996 - two decades after the Milwaukee diocese in Wisconsin first learned of the allegations, and two years before the priest died.

The diocese had been asked to take action by "restricting Father Murphy's public ministry and requiring that Father Murphy accept full responsibility for the gravity of his acts", Fr Lombardi said.

"Father Murphy died approximately four months later, without further incident," the statement said.

The papal spokesman also noted that police at the time investigated the allegations, but did not bring charges.

A strongly worded Vatican newspaper editorial said there was "no cover-up" over the case, which was reported in Thursday's edition of the New York Times.

L'Osservatore Romano labelled the allegations "clearly an ignoble attempt to strike at Pope Benedict and his closest aides at any cost".

Meanwhile, one of the Pope's top aides, Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, told reporters there was "a conspiracy" against the Church, without specifying who was responsible.

The Pope was also supported in the UK by the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, who said the then Cardinal Ratzinger had not been an "idle observer" in the case.

Writing in the Times, the Archbishop also said the Pope had introduced changes into Church law to protect children.

The BBC's Robert Pigott in Milwaukee says the US case is particularly shocking, not only because the priest abused boys but because he was allowed to go on to another diocese where he had access to children all over again.

Our correspondent says that although there is no direct evidence against the then Cardinal Ratzinger, this is an uncomfortable confluence of events for the Vatican. This is a case of concealment, he says, and that is where the Pope will have a case to answer.

Ireland letter

Fr Murphy - who admitted abusing boys before he died in 1998 - is said to have targeted victims in their dormitory beds, on school trips and even at confession.

Fr Lawrence Murphy died in 1998 with no official blemish on his record

Lawsuits have been filed on behalf of five men alleging the Archdiocese of Milwaukee did not take sufficient action against the priest.

Last week the Pope issued an unprecedented letter to Ireland addressing the 16 years of clerical cover-up scandals.

He has yet to comment on his handling of a child sex abuse case involving a German priest, which developed while Benedict was overseeing the Munich archdiocese.

Fr Peter Hullermann had been accused of abusing boys when the now Pope approved his 1980 transfer to Munich to receive psychological treatment for paedophilia.

The disgraced priest was convicted in 1986 of abusing a youth, but stayed within the Church for another two decades.

Sir Ken Macdonald, former Director of Public Prosecutions in England and Wales, said the Vatican ought to report all abuse cases to the police.

"If teachers in a school commit abuse against children, we don't say it's for the school to resolve that issue," Sir Ken told Radio 4's Today programme.

CatholicCulture.org

March 26, 2010

The Legion of Christ has issued a public apology to "all those who have been affected, wounded, or scandalized by the reprehensible actions of our founder."

The leaders of the troubled order acknowledged that the late Father Marcial Maciel fathered a child during a long affair, "and committed other grave acts." The Legionaries had previously acknowledged the founder's improprieties but never enumerated them.

For years the Legion of Christ had held up Father Maciel as an exemplar of virtue, and encountered members to emulate him. Now the order conceded: "We accept that, given the gravity of his faults, we cannot take his person as a model of Christian or priestly life."

The formal statement came as the Vatican weighs the report of five bishops who had investigated the affairs of the Legionaries. The order now awaits a decision from the Holy See on whether the Legion should be given a new leader, restructured, or even disbanded.

Legionaries acknowledge founder abused seminarians, ask forgiveness 

Catholic News Service 

26 March 2010 

By John Thavis  

ROME (CNS) -- Top officials of the Legionaries of Christ acknowledged that the order's founder, the late Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, sexually abused young seminarians, and they asked forgiveness for failing to listen to his accusers. 

A statement released March 26 by the Legionaries and its lay branch, Regnum Christi, said that any members of the order who were guilty of cooperation in Father Maciel's crimes would be held accountable. 

The statement said the Legionaries were looking to the future with the hope of continuing to serve the church, but with a greater emphasis on reconciling with those who suffered from Father Maciel's actions and greater cooperation with local pastors and other church officials. 

The future of the order rests in the hands of Pope Benedict XVI, who ordered an apostolic visitation of the Legionaries last year. The visitation team's report was expected to be handed in to the Vatican at the end of April. 

After investigating allegations that Father Maciel had sexually abused young seminarians, in May 2006 the Vatican ordered him to stop practicing his ministry in public and to live a life of prayer and penitence. At the time, Legion officials defended Father Maciel's declaration of innocence and compared him to Christ for his suffering. 

The latest statement says the 2006 Vatican investigation reached "sufficient moral certainty to impose serious canonical sanctions related to the accusations made against Father Maciel, which included the sexual abuse of minor seminarians." 

"Therefore, though it causes us consternation, we have to say that these acts did take place," it said. 

The statement asked forgiveness from "those whom we did not believe or were incapable of giving a hearing to, since at the time we could not imagine that such behavior took place." 

"If it turns out that anyone culpably cooperated in his misdeeds, we will act according to the principles of Christian justice and charity, holding these people responsible for their actions," it said. 

In early 2009, the Legionaries said it had learned that Father Maciel had fathered a daughter. The latest statement said Father Maciel had had a longstanding relationship with the child's mother, and that two other people have since come forward, claiming to be the offspring of Father Maciel and a different woman. 

"We find reprehensible these and all the actions in the life of Father Maciel that were contrary to his Christian, religious, and priestly duties. We declare that they are not what we strive to live in the Legion of Christ and in the Regnum Christi movement," it said. 

"Once again, we express our sorrow and grief to each and every person damaged by our founder's actions," the statement said. It offered the order's "pastoral and spiritual help" to those who were injured by Father Maciel's actions. 

Father Maciel, who died in January 2008 at age 87, founded the Legionaries of Christ in 1951 and was its superior until 2005. 

The Legionaries' statement said that God, "for his own mysterious reasons," had chosen Father Maciel to found the order and its lay association, and "we thank God for the good he did." 

"At the same time, we accept and regret that, given the gravity of his faults, we cannot take his person as a model of Christian or priestly life," it said. 

The statement said the Legionaries would follow the instructions given by Pope Benedict in light of the Vatican investigation, which was conducted in the order's institutions around the world. Many at the Vatican expect a major reorganization of the Legionaries, perhaps with direct supervision by the Vatican. 

As it looks to the future, the statement said, the Legionaries resolved to do several things, including: 

-- Reach out to those who have suffered. 

-- Tell the truth about the order's history. 

-- Protect minors in all its institutions. 

-- Cooperate better with bishops and church institutions. 

-- Continue oversight and demand accountability in the order. 

-- Redouble its efforts to bring the Gospel to as many people as possible. 

END

The Australian

From: AFP March 26, 2010 9:13AM

VATICAN CITY: The Vatican has defended Pope Benedict XVI against an allegation that he failed to act over a US priest accused of molesting up to 200 deaf children in the 1970s.

The Roman Catholic Church's morals watchdog, then headed by future pope Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was reportedly alerted twice by the archbishop of Wisconsin of the accusations against Reverend Lawrence Murphy.

Ratzinger did not respond to the letters, and a secret canonical trial authorised by his deputy was halted after Murphy wrote a pleading letter to the future pope, The New York Times said, citing documents provided by victims' lawyers.

The Vatican replied overnight that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith chaired by Ratzinger had suggested “restricting” Murphy's public functions and “requiring (him to) accept full responsibility for the gravity of his acts”.

The priest was accused of abusing hearing-impaired children systematically between 1950 and 1974.

The Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano denounced what it called an “ignoble attempt” to smear the Pope and his closest aides “at all costs”.

In an editorial, the paper touted the Pope's “transparency, firmness and severity” in response to cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and said: “There was no cover-up in the case of Father Murphy.”

The editorial confirms that Murphy, wrote to then Cardinal Ratzinger in 1998 asking him to halt church legal proceedings against him because of his ill health.

Ratzinger's deputy Tarcisio Bertone - now the Vatican number two - responded to the letter by asking the Milwaukee archbishop to “obtain reparation of the scandal and the reestablishment of justice”, Osservatore Romano said.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith chaired by Ratzinger suggested “restricting” Murphy's public functions and “requiring (him to) accept full responsibility for the gravity of his acts,” the Vatican told The New York Times earlier.

Its rationale was that “Father Murphy was elderly and in very poor health, and that he was living in seclusion and no allegations of abuse had been reported in over 20 years,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi added.

He noted that Murphy died in 1998 aged 72, four months after the congregation's instruction.

The “canonical question” addressed to the congregation, which Ratzinger headed from 1981 until 2005, “was in no way related to a potential civil or criminal procedure against Murphy”, Osservatore Romano said.

A Vatican watcher mocked the statement, saying: “From the canonical point of view (Ratzinger) followed the procedures.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, he told AFP: “This Nuremberg-style defence is completely inappropriate and cannot mollify public opinion.”

The reference was to the 1946 Nuremberg trials of senior Nazis, who told the court that they had only followed orders.

Benedict has continually spoken out and apologised for the “heinous crime” of child sex abuse by priests, meeting victims in the US and in Australia.

A French bishop who met the Pope last week said overnight that the pontiff had been deeply affected by the accusations of pedophilia against the Catholic Church.

“He is not being allowed the presumption of innocence: I have confidence in his will to bring clarity,” said Michel Dubost, Bishop of Evry, near Paris

The new revelation follows months of predator priest scandals in Europe, including Ireland, Austria, The Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland, as well as the Pope's native Germany.

Two revelations in Germany concerned the Pope and his brother Georg, the first having authorised lodging for a known abuser and the second having headed a boys' choir whose members had earlier suffered abuse.

From Times Online

March 25, 2010

Jenny Booth

Secret documents today placed Pope Benedict XVI at the centre of allegations of cover-up by the Catholic church of a priest sex abuse scandal in the United States.

Letters from the Vatican show that the enforcement department headed by the pontiff, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, took control of the efforts to bring paedophile priest Father Lawrence Murphy to justice, first ordering in 1997 that a church trial could only go ahead in conditions of total secrecy and then changing tack in 1998 and quashing it.

The change of heart came after Fr Murphy, who had sexually abused 200 vulnerable youths at a school for the deaf in Milwaukee between 1950 and 1974, wrote directly to the future Pope begging for mercy.

Monsignor Tarcisio Bertone, then Cardinal Ratzinger's deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, responded by writing to the US church suggesting they take only lesser, pastoral measures against Fr Murphy.

When the US church refused, insisting on a canonical trial, Monsignor Bertone called a summit meeting in Rome with the US bishops and told them bluntly to call the trial off and merely prevent the Fr Murphy from celebrating Mass.

"This Dicastery has every hope that the priest in question will demonstrate a willingness to cooperate in the solution to this painful case which will favour the good of souls and avoid scandal," wrote Monsignor Bertone.

A further letter from Monsignor Bertone later in 1998, after Fr Murphy had died of natural causes, returns to the same theme of preventing news of sex abuse leaking out to the media.

"This Dicastery commends Fr Murphy to the mercy of God and shares with you the hope that the Church will be spared any undue publicity from this matter," writes Monsignor Bertone, in a letter that is entirely silent on the subject of the suffering of Fr Murphy's victims.

The letters, published today on the website of the New York Times , have added to the mounting accusations that Pope Benedict had, at the least, made no effort to halt the widespread cover up of cases of sex abuse and appears in fact to have encouraged and even led the Catholic church's climate of secrecy.

In 2001 Cardinal Ratzinger issued a letter to every diocese in the Catholic Church, conceding that sex abuse was a grave crime but insisting: "Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret."

The Vatican says that this meant simply that trial judges were obliged not to reveal any details of the case. The letter appears however to have been widely interpreted by dioceses throughout the Catholic world to mean that the Church should avoid publicity at all costs over paedophile priests, to the extent of failing to report offenders to the police. This is no evidence that the future Pope did anything to correct this.

Today a group of American clerical abuse victims were arrested as, flanked by photos of other clerical abuse victims and a poster of Ratzinger, they tried to hold a press conference outside the Vatican to denounce Benedict's handling of the Murphy case.

"The goal of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was to keep this secret," said Peter Isely, Milwaukee-based director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.

"This is the most incontrovertible case of paedophilia you could get. 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 Pope is also under attack in Germany, where his handling as Archbishop of Munich of the case of repeat child sex abuser Father Peter Hullermann has this week come under ferocious criticism.

In 1980 he chaired a meeting at which it was decided to move Hullermann from Essen to Archbishop Ratzinger's diocese, after persuading the parents of the 11-year-old whom he had forced to have oral sex not to press charges, it has emerged. The future Pope approved the transfer and ordered him to undergo therapy.

Hullermann went on to reoffend on many occasions, but was not prevented from practising as a priest until last Monday. The Pope has yet to comment on the case.

The pontiff has also been accused of knowing and failing to take action of reports of child sexual abuse at the Regensburg Domspatzen, the famous choir school where his brother Georg was choirmaster.

Today Professor Hans Kung, a noted theologian who has known the Pope since the 1960s, issued a devastating indictment of his former colleague's alleged collusion in clerical cover up.

"No-one in the whole of the Catholic church knows as much about abuse cases, knowledge that is ex officio, derived from his office (as head of the Vatican enforcement department for 24 years)," said Professor Kung.

"This Vatican authority has for a long time centralised (information about) all abuse cases so that they can be concealed, classified as top secret."

The Vatican is facing an ever-widening church abuse scandal sweeping Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands and Benedict's native Germany. An opinion poll in Germany, where more than 300 allegations of priestly sex abuse have emerged recently, has shown that public trust in Benedict has plummeted to just 17 per cent.

It is unclear exactly how much Cardinal Ratzinger knew of the detail of the Murphy case. Cardinal Bertone, who handled it in person, has served alongside Pope Benedict for 15 years and is now his Cardinal Secretary of State. Several of the letters are addressed directly to the future Pope by name, including Fr Murphy's successful plea for clemency, making it likely that he would have read them personally.

"I am 72 years of age, your Eminence, and am in poor health," Father Murphy pleaded with Cardinal Ratzinger. "I have just recently suffered another stroke which has left me in a weakened state. I have followed all the directives of both Archbishop Cousins and now Archbishop Weakland. I have repented of any of my past transgressions and have been living peaceably in northern Wisconsin for 24 years."

Evidence existed in his file to show that these were lies - he had continued to molest youths after he was banished from Milwaukee to Wisconsin in 1974, and social workers and priests reported that he had shown not a shred of remorse after confessing his crimes.

Donald Marshall, 45, of West Allis, Wisconsin, said he was abused by Murphy when he was a teenager at the Lincoln Hills School, a juvenile detention centre 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 today. "These predators are preying on God’s children. How can they even stand up at the pulpit and preach the word of God?"

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev Federico Lombardi, said in a statement that the Vatican was not told about the abuse allegations against Fr Murphy until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated and dropped the case. Fr Murphy’s age, poor health and a lack of more recent allegations were factors in the decision not to defrock him, he added.

He pointed out that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had suggested some sanctions, such things as restricting Murphy’s public ministry and requiring that he "accept full responsibility for the gravity of his acts".

Hundreds, if not thousands, of similar cases will have crossed Cardinal Ratzinger's desk in the 24 years that he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. It is estimated that in the majority of cases no legal action was taken by the church.