Vatican Child Sex Abuse Scandal Biggest Crisis Since Reformation

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Archbishop Vincent Nichols Defends Pope Benedict XVI Amid Sex Abuse Scandal

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Archbishop Comes To Pope’s Defense



A leading archbishop and Vatican officials defended the pope on Friday, amid increasing allegations that top members of the church hierarchy protected pedophile priests at the expense of those they abused.

While acknowledging that past child abuse and its concealment by the church was "deeply shocking and totally unacceptable," the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols defended Pope Benedict XVI in an article in London's Times newspaper.

"He is not an idle observer. His actions speak as well as his words," wrote Nichols, who is head of the Catholic church in England and Wales.

When the pope was an archbishop he led important changes in church law, such as the extension of child abuse offenses to include the sexual abuse of all under 18; the case by case waiving of the statute of limitations; and the establishment of a fast-track dismissal for offenders, Nichols pointed out in his article.

The archbishop wrote that less than 0.4 percent of priests in England and Wales had been accused of abuse and since 2001 all allegations of sexual abuse had been reported to the police or social services.

"As far as I know, no other organization in this country does this," the Archbishop wrote. "It is not a cover-up; it is clear and total disclosure. The purpose of doing so is not to defend the Church."

"It is to make plain that in the Catholic Church in England and Wales there is no hiding place for those who seek to harm children," he added.

On Thursday, an editorial in a Vatican newspaper rejected claims that the pope failed to act against a Wisconsin priest accused of abusing up to 200 deaf boys two decades ago and denied there was a "cover-up."

"The prevalent tendency in the media is to ignore the facts and stretch interpretations with the aim of spreading the picture of the Catholic Church as the only one responsible for sexual abuse, something which does not correspond to reality," the editorial went on to say.

In 1996, leading U.S. clergy had complained about the priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, to a Vatican office led by the future pope, but received no response.

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Perilously close to Pope

A scandal of alleged cover-ups of sexual abuse of children by priests has been convulsing the Roman Catholic Church in Europe with even more intensity than a similar one which hit the United States eight years ago.

But this time it has come perilously close to the pope himself as victims groups have said they want to know how he handled cases before his election in 2005.

The pope had known of a cover-up "for many years," claimed one victim, speaking to BBC News. The pontiff should confess about what he knew, Arthur Budzinski, 61, said.

"It goes all the way up to him — he was in charge of these types of cases," he said, according to the BBC.

There have been also allegations of a cover-up of sexual abuse in Munich, in his native Germany, when he was the city's archbishop from 1977 to 1981. Victims groups have called for information on his decisions when he headed the Vatican doctrinal department from 1981 to 2005.

The Vatican was responding to the release of documents, first reported by The New York Times, that showed how the pope's former office told a Wisconsin bishop to shut down the church trial against Rev. Murphy, who was accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys from 1950 to 1975.

Murphy died in 1998, two years after Ratzinger first learned of the accusations, and more than 20 years after they came to the attention of the Milwaukee diocese.

The Munich archdiocese has said that Ratzinger was also involved in a 1980 decision to allow a priest who had been accused of abusing boys, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, to be transferred there for therapy.

However, Ratzinger's then-deputy, Gerhard Gruber, said earlier this month he took full responsibility for a subsequent decision to allow the priest to return to pastoral duties. Hullermann was convicted in 1986 of sexual abuse during a later posting.

The New York Times reported Friday that that the future pope was copied in on a memo saying that the priest would quickly be returned to pastoral work, and that church officials could not rule out that Ratzinger read it.


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Pope Benedict XVI Failed To Remove Sex Abusing Priest

Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys


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.

Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.

Even as the pope himself in a recent letter to Irish Catholics has emphasized the need to cooperate with civil justice in abuse cases, the correspondence seems to indicate that the Vatican’s insistence on secrecy has often impeded such cooperation. At the same time, the officials’ reluctance to defrock a sex abuser shows that on a doctrinal level, the Vatican has tended to view the matter in terms of sin and repentance more than crime and punishment.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was shown the documents and was asked to respond to questions about the case. He provided a statement saying that Father Murphy had certainly violated “particularly vulnerable” children and the law, and that it was a “tragic case.” But he pointed out that the Vatican was not forwarded the case until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated the case and dropped it.

Father Lombardi emphasized that neither the Code of Canon Law nor the Vatican norms issued in 1962, which instruct bishops to conduct canonical investigations and trials in secret, prohibited church officials from reporting child abuse to civil authorities. He did not address why that had never happened in this case.

As to why Father Murphy was never defrocked, he said that “the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties.” He said that Father Murphy’s poor health and the lack of more recent accusations against him were factors in the decision.

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The Vatican’s inaction is not unusual. Only 20 percent of the 3,000 accused priests whose cases went to the church’s doctrinal office between 2001 and 2010 were given full church trials, and only some of those were defrocked, according to a recent interview in an Italian newspaper with Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the chief internal prosecutor at that office. An additional 10 percent were defrocked immediately. Ten percent left voluntarily. But a majority — 60 percent — faced other “administrative and disciplinary provisions,” Monsignor Scicluna said, like being prohibited from celebrating Mass.

To many, Father Murphy appeared to be a saint: a hearing man gifted at communicating in American Sign Language and an effective fund-raiser for deaf causes. A priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, he started as a teacher at St. John’s School for the Deaf, in St. Francis, in 1950. He was promoted to run the school in 1963 even though students had disclosed to church officials in the 1950s that he was a predator.

Victims give similar accounts of Father Murphy’s pulling down their pants and touching them in his office, his car, his mother’s country house, on class excursions and fund-raising trips and in their dormitory beds at night. Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went to Father Murphy for confession when he was about 12, in 1960.

“If he was a real mean guy, I would have stayed away,” said Mr. Budzinski, now 61, who worked for years as a journeyman printer. “But he was so friendly, and so nice and understanding. I knew he was wrong, but I couldn’t really believe it.”

Mr. Budzinski and a group of other deaf former students spent more than 30 years trying to raise the alarm, including passing out leaflets outside the Milwaukee cathedral. Mr. Budzinski’s friend Gary Smith said in an interview that Father Murphy molested him 50 or 60 times, starting at age 12. By the time he graduated from high school at St. John’s, Mr. Smith said, “I was a very, very angry man.”

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.”

Recently some bishops have argued that the 1962 norms dictating secret disciplinary procedures have long fallen out of use. But it is clear from these documents that in 1997, they were still in force.

But the effort to dismiss Father Murphy came to a sudden halt after the priest appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency.

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.”

Father Murphy died four months later at age 72 and was buried in his priestly vestments. Archbishop Weakland wrote a last letter to Cardinal Bertone explaining his regret that Father Murphy’s family had disobeyed the archbishop’s instructions that the funeral be small and private, and the coffin kept closed.

“In spite of these difficulties,” Archbishop Weakland wrote, “we are still hoping we can avoid undue publicity that would be negative toward the church.”


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Pope Benedict XVI Attacked During Christmas Eve Mass

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Pope Knocked Down At Christmas Eve Mass


Pope Benedict XVI's Christmas Eve Mass at St. Peter's Basilica got off to a tumultuous start Thursday after an apparently deranged woman jumped the barriers and knocked him down on his way to the altar.

The 82-year-old pope quickly got up and was unhurt, said a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini. But 87-year-old French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, a longtime Vatican diplomat who was also dragged down, fractured his hip in the fall and will be operated on, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said Friday.

The pope delivered his traditional Christmas Day blessing Friday, looking tired and unsteady but otherwise fine. The Vatican said his busy Christmas schedule would remain unchanged.

Footage aired on Italy's RAI state TV showed a woman dressed in a red hooded sweatshirt vaulting over the wooden barriers and rushing toward the pope before being swarmed by bodyguards.

Lombardi identified the woman as Susanna Maiolo, a Swiss-Italian national with psychiatric problems. Video shot by a witness showed Maiolo grabbing the pope's vestments as she was taken down, with Benedict seemingly falling on top of her.

Vatican officials speaking on condition of anonymity said Maiolo was involved in a similar incident last year in which she jumped the barricade as the pope passed. In that case, however, Maiolo never managed to reach the pope and was quietly tackled to the ground by security.

In both cases she wore a red sweat shirt.

The commotion occurred as the pope's procession was making its way toward the main altar and shocked gasps rang out through the crowd that packed the basilica. The procession came to a halt and security rushed to the trouble spot.

Benedettini said Maiolo was arrested by Vatican police. "During the procession an unstable person jumped a barrier and knocked down the Holy Father," Benedettini told The Associated Press by telephone. "(The pope) quickly got up and continued the procession."

Security guards tackle woman

MaryBeth Burns from Paris, Texas, was about four people away from Maiolo and was filming the pope's procession as the commotion started.

"I'm really mad because I had a perfect shot lined up," she said. "I'm still shaking."

Burns, who was visiting Italy with her family on a religious pilgrimage for Christmas, said the security guards immediately pulled the woman to the ground and the pope tumbled with them.

Benedict lost his miter and his staff in the fall. He remained on the ground for a few seconds before being helped back up by attendants. At that point a few shouts of "viva il papa!" (long live the pope!) rang out, followed by cheers from the faithful, witnesses said.

After getting up, Benedict, flanked by tense bodyguards, resumed his walk to the basilica's main altar to start the Mass. He did appear somewhat shaken and leaned heavily on aides and an armrest as he sat down in his chair.

Few people who were watching the Mass on giant screens set up in a rain-soaked St. Peter's Square even knew that the pope had fallen, with many saying that either they weren't looking or had arrived too late.

Benedict made no reference to the incident as the service started. As a choir sang, he sprinkled incense on the altar before opening the Mass with the traditional wish for peace in Latin.

Security Breaches

The latest incident was the first time a potential attacker came into direct contact with Benedict, and underscored concerns by security analysts who have frequently warned the pope is too exposed in his public appearances.

There have been other security breaches at the Vatican, in addition to this year's and last year's incidents.

In 2007, during an open-air audience in St. Peter's Square, a mentally unstable German man jumped a security barrier and grabbed the back of the pope's open car before being swarmed by security guards.

Then there was the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca in 1981. John Paul suffered a severe abdominal wound as he rode in an open jeep at the start of his weekly audience in the Vatican piazza.

The pope is protected by a combination of Swiss Guards, Vatican police and Italian police.

Delivers Homily

Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., the Vatican has tightened security at events where the pope is present. All visitors must pass by police to get into the square, with some going through metal detectors or being scanned by metal-detecting wands.

In a similar incident to Thursday's, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was attacked as he was greeting the crowd at a political rally earlier this month. A man with a history of psychological problems hurled a souvenir statuette at the politician, fracturing his nose and breaking two of his teeth.

Benedict celebrated this year's Christmas Eve Mass two hours earlier than the usual midnight starting time in a move by the Vatican to ease the pontiff's busy holiday schedule.

In his homily, delivered unflappably after the incident, Benedict urged the world to "wake up" from selfishness and petty affairs, and find time for God and spiritual matters.

"To wake up means to leave that private world of one's own and to enter the common reality," Benedict said. "Conflict and lack of reconciliation in the world stem from the fact that we are locked into our own interests and opinions, into our own little private world."

Benedict's next scheduled appearance is at noon on Christmas Day, when he is to deliver his traditional "Urbi et Orbi" Speech (Latin for "To the city and the world") from the basilica's balcony.




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