Pope failed to act on sex abuse claim
Posted by myps | Filed under Others
Archbishops had complained about Fr Lawrence Murphy in the 1990s to a Vatican office led by the future pope, 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 the Pope 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 Catholic Church has been plagued in recent months by abuse cover-up claims in Europe, echoing paedophilia scandals that rocked the institution in America eight years ago.
Fr Murphy was a popular priest who 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”, the Rev Lombardi said.
The papal spokesman also noted that police at the time investigated the allegations, but did not bring charges.
If there is anyone who is interested in hot issues happening everyday in the world, who is curious about those prominent political figures’ lives, who is yearn for leaning more about the word, here is your place. Our blog focuses on those well-known political issues and figures of all countries. It covers everything you want to learn, say, those political affairs, something behind those issues as well as the private life of those famous people.