The Pope has been named as a defendant for the first time in a lawsuit over the child abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic church.Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as he was known then, is said to have failed to take action against an American priest who molested up to 200 boys at a deaf school.
Father Lawrence C Murphy abused the children in their dormitory beds in Wisconsin where he worked between 1950 and 1974.
The lawsuit has been brought by deaf abuse victim Terry Kohut, who claims the Pope failed to take action against an American priest who molested up to 200 boys at his school
It became one of the most notorious cases to engulf the Catholic Church and was brought to the attention of The Pope whilst he was in charge of the body that dealt with serious sins.
The lawsuit is the first to name The Pontiff as an individual defendant, supposedly because culpability for the molestation went right to the top.
It raises the possibility that he could be called as a witness during court proceedings or faces the humiliation of being subpoenaed should he refuse to attend.
The new lawsuit has been brought by deaf abuse victim Terry Kohut, 60, who has come forward for the first time to tell his story.
He was abused by Father Murphy whilst he was priest and headteacher at St. John’s School for the Deaf, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Following years of allegations and reports of abuse and threats of legal action, local bishops moved Father Murphy to a remote parish in northern Wisconsin in 1974. More abuse claims ensued.
In 1996 the Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rev. Rembert Weakland, wrote to then Cardinal Ratzinger at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's department for dealing with particularly grave sins, asking him how to proceed.
Whilst initially told to carry out a secret church trial, the Archbishop was subsequently ordered in a letter from the Cardinal’s office to end the investigation and use ‘pastoral’ measures instead.
The U-turn came after Father Murphy wrote a letter to future Pontiff begging for clemency.
In it he said: ‘I am seventy-two years of age, your Eminence, and am in poor health. I have repented of any of my past transgressions. I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood’.
Father Murphy died in 1998, still a priest and was buried in Milwaukee with full honours.
Three years later Cardinal Ratzinger issued an edict instructing Roman Catholic bishops around the world to report all child abuse cases to the Vatican under strict secrecy, rather than refer them to the police.
The Father Murphy case is being handled by Minnesota-based lawyer Jeff Anderson, who has field hundreds of lawsuits for sexual abuse of victims.
He said from the evidence he had seen Cardinal Ratzinger did little to help the victims, and was mostly interested in protecting the church from scandal.
Peter Isely, a leader in SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said the Father Murphy case is one of the worst examples of paedophilia in U.S. history.
‘This is the story of a man raping and assaulting 200 deaf children,’ he said. ‘To think that there are all these children being raped - these disabled deaf children - who can’t even scream out, can’t speak out. It’s monstrous.’
In a rare interview Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s prosecutor, said that Cardinal Ratzinger’s judgement was not faulty because it ‘took care of reparation, of scandal in the sense that it expected a public admission of guilt and it also ensured that Father Murphy be kept in a ministry which did not constitute a risk.’
Asked if the treatment of Father Murphy was a mistake, Monsignor Scicluna said: ‘No, I wouldn’t call it a mistake. I would call it a different take on a very difficult case.’
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