Pope failed to act upon claims of abuse by US priest

TOP Vatican officials, including the future Pope Benedict XVI, did not react to letters about an American priest who molested as many as 200 deaf school children.

This latest scandal to rock the foundations of the Vatican, has been shown in documents posted on The New York Times website.

The documents include a 1996 letter to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the Vatican’s top doctrinal official and not yet Pope, showing he was informed of the case. But the Vatican did nothing to discipline Lawrence Murphy, an American priest, who worked at St John’s School for the Deaf in Wisconsin from 1950 to 1974.

Yesterday, the Vatican insisted there was no cover-up in the Church’s handling of the case. But several American bishops repeatedly warned the Vatican officials 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.”

Yesterday, an Irish Catholic lobby group said “the clergy abuse scandal has truly reached the top”.

A spokesperson for Voice of the Faithful added, “this conscious choice to secretly excuse a priest paedophile, has led to even more sorrow in the Church. Church officials, at the highest levels of the administrative structure, placed a higher value on the temporary image of institution than on the ongoing safety of innocent children.

A victim of Lawrence Murphy’s abuse, held a news conference outside the headquarters of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and said the Pope knew about the scandal.

“He should be held accountable. I believe somebody should be punished,” Arthur Budzinski said.

The case involving Murphy, who is believed to have molested as many as 200 boys at St John’s between 1950 and 1974, is one of thousands of cases that have been forwarded by bishops to the Vatican.

Budzinski, whose sign language was spoken by his daughter, GiGi, said Murphy would come into their dorm at night, take them into a closet and molest them.

He detailed abuse at the hands of Murphy and said he told Archbishop William E Cousins and other officials about the abuse in 1974 when he was 26 years of age. The archbishop yelled at Budzinski, he said, and he left the meeting crying.

Yesterday, four victims of clerical sex abuse were held by Italian police after demonstrating outside the Vatican.

The group of Americans had demanded the Pope release all files on paedophile clergy worldwide.

The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said there was a “clear and despicable intention” to strike at Pope Benedict XVI “at any cost”, with recent revelations of how the Vatican handled clerical abuse.

The documents posted on the New York Times’ website were provided by two lawyers who filed lawsuits alleging the Archdiocese of Milwaukee didn’t take sufficient action against Father Lawrence Murphy.

The documents emerged as the Vatican deals with an ever-widening Church abuse scandal sweeping several European countries.

Pope Benedict last week issued an unprecedented letter addressing 16 years of scandals in Ireland. Survivors of child abuse in the campaigning group, One in Four, condemned the Pope for failing to acknowledge in his letter that the Irish Church hierarchy had attempted to suppress the scandal.

The Pope has yet to say anything about his handling of a case in Germany known to have developed when, as cardinal, he oversaw the Munich Archdiocese from 1977 to 1982.