The lie of the New York Times

In its typical fashion, the New York Times misrepresents reality with yesterday's lead article claiming that then Cardinal Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI - approved the transfer of a priest known to have sexually abused nearly two hundred children. The article, written by Laurie Goodstein and Rachel Donadio, with my emphases and comments, follows:

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 accuracy of such a statement will be revealed below].

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 [Be careful; the situation isn't quite what it would seem to be from the information provided].

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 [accusations of which Pope Benedict has been clearly shown to be innocent] .

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 [the authors are curiously silent as to the content of the letters]. 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 [trials are secret to protect the reputation of both the accused and the accusers; the accused is presumed innocent until proven otherwise. Even so, we still have not been told the accusation brought before the CDF].

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 [and yet seems to have failed to read them thoroughly], 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 [a reasonable request seeing how the NYT distorts them]. 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 if were "laicized," he would still be a priest; the sacrament cannot be taken away].

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 [notice the claim, despite the fact that we still don't know what was presented to the Holy See in the case against Murphy].

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 [Now that's curious. Where is the outrage against the civil authorities who dropped the case? If Murphy could not clearly be proved guilty in a civil court, how could he be proved guilty in an ecclesial court? Even so, we still don't know the charge sent to the Holy See].

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 [remember this point. In a short time we'll see that the charge the NYT brings against Pope Benedict XVI is entirely false]. 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” [which is true]. He said that Father Murphy’s poor health and the lack of more recent accusations against him were factors in the decision.

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 [others - the majority of the cases - were handled in an administrative way because the evidence against the accused priests was overwhelming, other priests were dead, and others were shown to be innocent, as Msgr. Scicluna clearly said in the referenced interview]. 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 [Ah, finally, the accusation sent to the Holy See. Notice it has no mention of anything specifically criminal or involving children or up to two hundred cases. All that is said is that solictation of sexual acts in the confessional might have occurred and, since nothing to the contrary is said, the presumption would be solicitation from adults. While this is horrendous and gravely sinful, it is not criminal].

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 not from a Vatican instruction; on the contrary, the Holy See repeatedly told Bishops to follow the norms, as we will see was the case with Murphy's case. The fault lies with individual bishops, not the Holy See, and certainly not with Pope Benedict. A failure of some to follow clear instructions cannot reasonably be construed to mean the Holy See took no action, as the reporters claim here]. 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.” [If such was the case, why did not the Archbishop not inform the Holy See of the full extent of the situation? Where is the outrage against Weakland?]

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 [Wait. The Church's instructions weren't followed? Surprise, surprise. How can the Church be held guilty if her instructions were not followed?].

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

Murphy's case is truly despicable and lamentable, but the way the NYT frames simply does not correspond to what actually transpired.

The Holy See issued a statement to correct the story, via Whispher in the Loggia, with my emphases and comments:

Transparency, firmness and severity in shedding light on the many cases of sexual abuse committed by priests and religious: these are the criteria that Benedict XVI has indicated with constancy and serenity to the whole Church. A way of operating -- coherent with his personal history and more than two-decade activities as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- that is evidently feared by those who don't want the truth affirmed and those who would prefer to be able to instrumentalize, without any foundation in fact, horrible episodes and sorrowful events uncovered in some cases from decades ago [if the reality were clearly and honestly reported it would completely destroy the author's template and their end goal could not be met].
This is demonstrated, most recently, in the article published today by the American newspaper "The New York Times," together with an editorial, on the grave case of the priest Lawrence C Murphy, guilty of abuse committed on deaf boys who were patients in a Catholic institute, where he worked from 1950 to 1974. According to the reconstruction made in the article, based on ample documentation provided by lawyers for some of the victims, reports relating to the conduct of the priest were only sent in July 1996 by the then-archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert G. Weakland, to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- its then prefect Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and its secretary Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone -- to the end of obtaining indications on the correct canonical procedure to follow. The request, in fact, referred not to the accusations of sexual abuse, but to a violation of the sacrament of penance, perpetrated by an enticement in the confessional, that takes place when a priest solicits a penitent to commit a sin against the sixth commandment (canon 1387) [Wait. The Holy See was not actually asked to "defrock" a priest, as the headline claimed?].

It is important to observe -- as the director of the Press Office of the Holy See has stated -- that the canonical question presented to the Congregation was not in any way linked with a potential civil or penal procedure against Fr Murphy. By contrast, the archdiocese had already begun a canonical procedure [Oh? Why is this not mentioned in the article? A Bishop does not need permission of the Holy See to begin an ecclesial trial], its evident result the same evident documentation published online by the New York newspaper. To the request of the archbishop, the Congregation replied, with a 24 March 1997 letter signed by the then-Archbishop Bertone, with an indication to proceed according to [the procedure] established in Crimen sollicitationis (1962) [So, the Holy See did respond to the request and did tell the Archbishop how to proceed? That seems contrary to the initial claim of hte article].

As can be easily deduced while reading the reconstruction compiled by the "New York Times" on the case of Fr Murphy, nothing was ever placed aside [insabbiamento -- shelved]. And confirmation of this comes from the documentation accompanying the article in question, in which figures the letter Fr Murphy wrote in 1998 to the then-Cardinal Ratzinger asking that the canonical procedure be interrupted for reasons of his grave health. Likewise in this case, the Congregation's response, written by Archbishop Bertone, invited the ordinary of Milwaukee to consider all the pastoral measures foreseen by canon 1341 to obtain the reparation of scandal and the restoration of justice [So, the Church wasn't simply concerned with her good name? The Church was concerned about the "restoration of justice"? Why does the article not mention this?].

Finally, these late matters have become indisputably confirmed by the Pope, as demonstrated in his recent pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland. But the prevalent tendency in the media is to obscure the facts and [instead] enforce interpretations to the end of circulating an image of the Catholic church as having been the only guilty party of sexual abuse, an image that doesn't correspond to reality. And one which instead manifests the evident and despicable intent of attacking, at whatever cost, Benedict XVI and his closest collaborators [well said].

Please, pray for the Holy Father as he enemies become all the hateful and stoop to new lows in their attempts to destroy him. Pray, too, for those who spread such vicious lies through the deceitful distortion of the truth.