MSNBC

5:17 AEST Tue Mar 30 2010

Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who tried to kill John Paul II in 1981, urged Pope Benedict XVI on Monday to resign over child abuse scandals, in his first news conference since his release in January. 

Brandishing a Turkish newspaper containing an article on appeals across the Christian world for judicial action against the pope, Agca said: "I do not want him to be arrested, I want him to resign. An Italian or South American cardinal should be chosen to replace him." 

Benedict XVI has come under intense pressure with allegations in the press that, as archbishop of Munich and later as the chief Vatican enforcer of Catholic doctrine and morals, he failed to act against priests accused of child abuse. 

Agca, who spent almost three decades in Italian and Turkish prisons for his attempt to kill John Paul II and crimes committed in Turkey, is known to closely follow developments involving the Vatican. 

His release on January 18 had raised hope he might finally lift the shroud of mystery still surrounding the assassination attempt, but the 52-year-old gunman has remained mum on the issue. 

A Turkish hospital has diagnosed him with an "advanced anti-social personality disorder". 

Agca, who claims to be the second Messiah and is believed by many to be seriously deranged, described himself Monday as "the Christ eternal" and "supreme and universal servant of God." 

He said the Apocalypse would take place within this century, adding he was currently writing "the perfect Bible". 

He said he had settled in Istanbul. Agca was a 23-year-old far-right militant, on the run from Turkish justice, when he resurfaced in Saint Peter's Square on May 13, 1981, and fired on the pope, leaving him seriously injured. His motive remains a mystery. 

Extradited to Turkey in 2000, Agca was convicted for the murder of a Turkish journalist, two armed robberies and escaping from prison, crimes all dating back to the 1970s.

Belfast Telegraph

Monday, 29 March 2010  

Pope Benedict XVI made it clear yesterday that he would not be intimidated by his critics over the ongoing sexual abuse scandal enveloping his Church.  

Officiating at Mass in Rome for Palm Sunday, which marks the start of the holiest week in the Catholic Church's calendar, the 82-year-old pontiff's characteristically cryptic sermon made no explicit mention of the global clerical sex abuse scandals that have thrown the Church into its worst crisis in decades.  

But he nevertheless fired a broadside against those who have called on him to do more to explain his previous role as the Vatican's head investigator of child abuse claims.  

The Pontiff reminded worshippers that belief in Jesus Christ helped lead Christians “towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion”.  

He also spoke of how man can sometimes “fall to the lowest, vulgar levels” and “sink into the swamp of sin and dishonesty”.  

The remarks are widely regarded as a reference to the growing furore over his leadership of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office he headed for more than 20 years before becoming Pope in 2005.  

One of the Congregation's primary remits is to investigate any clerical abuse allegations put before it.  

But the crisis over sex abuse allegations across Europe and in North America have put the Vatican and the Pope himself firmly on the back foot.  

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.

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.

Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who is now the doctrinal office's chief internal prosecutor, recently revealed that of 3,000 priests accused of sex abuse reported to the Vatican between 2001 and 2010, only 10 per cent were defrocked immediately. A further 20 per cent of cases went to trial, and some of those were defrocked. A further 10 per cent left the Church voluntarily. But in 60 per cent of cases, accused priests faced only "administrative and disciplinary provisions" such as being prevented from celebrating Mass, said Monsignor Scicluna.