The Pope and the Murphy case: what the New York Times story didn't tell you

[markomalley]

Good data. But I think you misread this one.

Duh. oops. I guess wishful thinking got in the way of my eyesight.

 

[miguel]

Duh. oops. I guess wishful thinking got in the way of my eyesight.

Well your main point that today’s numbers are down substantially shows that corrective measures taken by the Church are working. And no doubt parents are much more cautious as well…which can’t hurt either.

 

[chaunceygardner]

Not anger, but sadness, and a solidarity with the whole Church. As Catholics, we affirm that the good done by others redound to all, similarly, the sins of each member stains all of us. That’s why, in addition to instituting the necessary measures to prevent such, and other, filfth from taking root in the Church again, we must also collectively do penance together to make satisfaction for such mistakes. Each of us should take care also to examine ourselves and rid ourselves of the sins that still cling to us, and pray for one another.

(my underlining above and below)

I can understand praying for those who have sinned against God, Church and their fellow humans, but I am not sure I understand why everyone should do penance for the sins of others. This apparently would include the victims, and I can’t see how they were stained by the actions of those who abused them.

The first thing he should really do is to listen to what God is guiding him in this matter. If God can multiply five loaves and two fishes to feed five thousand men, a spoon might well be the tool he intends to use to restore the Church. If the tempest of the world would quell, perhaps it might be easier for everyone, Pope, Bishops and others, to hear the whisper of God.

Has anyone ever considered that God may not be whispering, but shouting to us through the anguish and the anger of the violated? Does God only communicate with the Pope? Perhaps the Holy Spirit speaks through the voices of the everyday Catholic, particularly those whose trust in their Church has been betrayed. Perhaps Benedict needs to listen to those voices, and look for the guidance of the Holy Spirit through them.

I realize the Pope is a little too old to do this, but he should make a representative group of priests, bishops, and yes, even Cardinals who have been part of these shameful acts and the resulting coverup put on hairshirts and crawl on hands and knees toward the Blessed Sacrament in St. Peter’s, announcing their sinfulness and asking God, those who have been victimized, and all the world for forgiveneness. Good Friday would be the perfect time for this.

But I feel safe in predicting that no one will even get sore knees over this.

 

[thereseozi]

I was just watching Sunday Night Live and Fr. Benedict Groeschel asks that we pray for the Pope and that we send a letter of protest to the New York Times.

Here is the address I used to contact the New York Times: letters@nytimes.com

 

[RobbyS]

The Vatican should have seen that Milwaukee had dropped the ball, that there was a massive cover-up and it was time to rectify this with an investigation, even after Murphy died. Not a formal trial–the perp was dead. But Rome could have interviewed the survivors, determined the nature and extent of the crimes and made some effort to make restitution to the victims. The fact that Murphy was old and dying gave Rome a very convenient excuse to drop everything.

The fact that the civil case was dropped is irrelevant.

I find the apparently massive efforts to defend the Vatican and Cardinal Ratzinger to be pathetic.

Do you not understand that the archdiocese was/is largely autonomous? Vatican II was, in a way, a rebellion against Rome, and the bishops and priests viewed themselves as having been liberated from the Curia? Furthermore, there were in the Vatican itself many liberals who felt this was only right. Before V2, there was nothing like the USCCB with its meetings and pronouncements on political matters. There was this feeling," Whee, we are finally a part of American society, just like the United Methodist Church." Lots and lots of walls got knocked down, but one thing wasn’t the feeling among clerics–or at least liberal clerics–that they were the wave of the future and that within a few years, the obscuratism of the “Old” Church would be swept into the waste bin of history.

 

[anode]

Do you not understand that the archdiocese was/is largely autonomous? Vatican II was, in a way, a rebellion against Rome, and the bishops and priests viewed themselves as having been liberated from the Curia? Furthermore, there were in the Vatican itself many liberals who felt this was only right. Before V2, there was nothing like the USCCB with its meetings and pronouncements on political matters. There was this feeling," Whee, we are finally a part of American society, just like the United Methodist Church." Lots and lots of walls got knocked down, but one thing wasn’t the feeling among clerics–or at least liberal clerics–that they were the wave of the future and that within a few years, the obscuratism of the “Old” Church would be swept into the waste bin of history.

Archbishop Weakland didn’t feel this was true when he wrote to Rome for an evaluation of the case, that the violation of the confessional, according to the canonists in his archdiocese, merited a review by Rome. Rome dragged its feet and finally deemed that the perp was too old to stand trial, and he died.

End of story.

Except that it was only the beginning.

 

[lemonbeam]

Listen to this radio program on the recent “revelations” about our Holy Father in the New York Times. It pretty much destroys the spurious allegations that, as Archbishop of Munich and Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Joseph Ratzinger tried to prevent prosecution of child molesting priests.

lewiscrusade.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/conspiracy-of-hypocrites-more-facts-on-pope-benedict-xvi/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheLewisCrusade+%28The+Lewis+Crusade%29

 

[whm]

(my underlining above and below)

I can understand praying for those who have sinned against God, Church and their fellow humans, but I am not sure I understand why everyone should do penance for the sins of others. This apparently would include the victims, and I can’t see how they were stained by the actions of those who abused them.

Victims are “stained” by their abusers for the rest of their lives. It often has a terrible effect on their future relationships. They don’t share in the sin of the abuse, but they are greatly effected by it. As far as communal penance, that idea is common
Catholic practice and not meant to imply that the victims are party to the sin of their abuse. (Jesus did the greatest penance of all with never sinning) As Catholics we believe that we are to imitate Christ is our lives and by doing so we(no make the He) can change the world. We are “to pick up our cross and follow” Him. That is not what the people involved in this case were doing.

Has anyone ever considered that God may not be whispering, but shouting to us through the anguish and the anger of the violated? Does God only communicate with the Pope? Perhaps the Holy Spirit speaks through the voices of the everyday Catholic, particularly those whose trust in their Church has been betrayed. Perhaps Benedict needs to listen to those voices, and look for the guidance of the Holy Spirit through them.

I realize the Pope is a little too old to do this, but he should make a representative group of priests, bishops, and yes, even Cardinals who have been part of these shameful acts and the resulting coverup put on hairshirts and crawl on hands and knees toward the Blessed Sacrament in St. Peter’s, announcing their sinfulness and asking God, those who have been victimized, and all the world for forgiveneness. Good Friday would be the perfect time for this.

But I feel safe in predicting that no one will even get sore knees over this.

I think JPII would have done something like this, although the personal mortification would have been in private and not for show. We all should be praying for healing. I hope that you can pray for this as well.

 

[feargalmac]

Archbishop Weakland didn’t feel this was true when he wrote to Rome for an evaluation of the case, that the violation of the confessional, according to the canonists in his archdiocese, merited a review by Rome. Rome dragged its feet and finally deemed that the perp was too old to stand trial, and he died.

End of story.

Except that it was only the beginning.

I’d love to see that letter. Was the case reported as something historic rather than current?

Another point in my tiny mind is that the Vatican, being the centre of a worldwide Church, probably receives thousands, if not tens of thousands, of letters etc, on a daily basis. Having worked at one time in our public service, even though my case-load consisted of maybe ten to twenty letters a day, it could take me some weeks to reply, checking facts, looking up records and such. I’m sure though that each person writing to me thought I was dragging my heels and couldn’t understand why replying took so long. So then Archbishop Bertone took some seven months to reply to Archbishop Weakland, this at a time that reports of clerical abuse were on the increase. If he had ignored the letter then there would be a case to answer, but he didn’t.

Anyway, Archbishop Weakland had 19 years to do something about Fr. Murphy and chose not to.

Question: Is it because Archbishop Weakland has “come out”, that the focus of contempt, in the liberal media, has transferred to Rome?

 

[Martlut]

Yea they didnt tell you this either how telling …

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100328/ap_on_re_us/us_church_abuse_wisconsin_lawyer

 

[markomalley]

From First Things:

The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog’s behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down—and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy. For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument.
​

The rest of the essay, on First Things magazine’s website, is well worth reading.

 

[RobbyS]

Archbishop Weakland didn’t feel this was true when he wrote to Rome for an evaluation of the case, that the violation of the confessional, according to the canonists in his archdiocese, merited a review by Rome. Rome dragged its feet and finally deemed that the perp was too old to stand trial, and he died.

End of story.

Except that it was only the beginning.

Rome found out about this twenty years after the fact when the guy was on his death bed. Who dragged its feet, Rome or the archdiocese.

It is fundamentally unjust to prosecute alleged offenders so long after the crime. That is why legal systems have statutes of limitations. And it was the diocese that was at fault.

 

[RobbyS]

From First Things:

The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog’s behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down—and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy. For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument.
​

The rest of the essay, on First Things magazine’s website, is well worth reading.

Amen. And it was the case that the Nazi regime resorted to the same tactics in the mid-thirties to discredit the Church among Catholics because of of its protests of Nazi violations of the Concordat.

 

[CradleCath]

From First Things:

The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog’s behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down—and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy. For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument.
​

The rest of the essay, on First Things magazine’s website, is well worth reading.

Thank you for posting this MarkO’Malley. I’ve never hidden my head in the sand about the Pederasty that was found in the Catholic Church & the harm it caused to the victims. However, this IS Holy Week & maybe some of those who seem to ENJOY our pain over this scandal…will look at their own front porches & let us focus on this most important time in our faith.

 

[chaunceygardner]

Two quotes from the post by Markomalley referencing First Things that I think deserve a closer look:

According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests

The various official reports put the percentage of abusive priests at 2 to 5% of all priests in that population. The two percent referred to above is regarding all sex abuse offenders. Based on the numbers of priests vs. the population of the U.S., priests represent at best 18/100 thousandths of the population, but are, as this article says, 2% of all sex offenders. That is a ratio that is more than 11,000 times higher than the ratio of priests to the general population.

And the number of priests isn’t the whole story. It is the volume of abuse. The reports show a high incidence of repeated offenses, so that small numbers of priests are responsible for a very high number of acts, in some cases over a period of decades.

That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line

That the history of abuse extends back many decades IS an issue, and is of consequence. If proper actions had been taken in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s or 70’s, think how many innocent children would have been saved!

The biggest crime is that so many closed their eyes to the tragedy: not only the people around those priests who knew, but also Bishops and other Church authorities, the criminal justice system, the social services system, all kinds of people. It is was a systemic failure to protect the young and vulnerable and to protect the reputation of the Church instead.

As a result, the Church’s reputation has been damaged far beyond what would have occurred if those in a position of responsibility had acted properly.

 

[silentstar]

Rome found out about this twenty years after the fact when the guy was on his death bed. Who dragged its feet, Rome or the archdiocese.

It is fundamentally unjust to prosecute alleged offenders so long after the crime. That is why legal systems have statutes of limitations. And it was the diocese that was at fault.

The diocese and also the secular authorities. Victims began complaining about this priest in the 1950s and they never stopped complaining. the Deaf community attempted to raise awareness for 30 years. This abuse was reported to the police numerous times. They investigated but never prosecuted.

indianexpress.com/news/Victims–accounts-of-sexual-abuse-fell-on-deaf-ears/596558

I think that unfortunately, b/c they were Deaf, they were less likely to be taken seriously. From what I understand decades ago, in general not just among Catholics, some people believed that children with disabilities should appreciate any attention/education they got and not complain. It was not that long ago that disabled children were routinely put in institutions; that only started changing in the 1940s.

 

[anode]

The diocese and also the secular authorities. Victims began complaining about this priest in the 1950s and they never stopped complaining. the Deaf community attempted to raise awareness for 30 years. This abuse was reported to the police numerous times. They investigated but never prosecuted.

indianexpress.com/news/Victims–accounts-of-sexual-abuse-fell-on-deaf-ears/596558

I think that unfortunately, b/c they were Deaf, they were less likely to be taken seriously. From what I understand decades ago, in general not just among Catholics, some people believed that children with disabilities should appreciate any attention/education they got and not complain. It was not that long ago that disabled children were routinely put in institutions; that only started changing in the 1940s.

The deaf boys and later men tried for decades to get someone to listen to them, telling priests, nuns, and three archbishops to listen to them. No one listened. *They *all were deaf, too. Finally Weakland wrote Cardinal Ratzinger in 1996. The case dragged on until Murphy died.

Here’s the time line for the ‘investigation’ by Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation;

documents.nytimes.com/reverend-lawrence-c-murphy-abuse-case#document/p1

1) July 16, 1996—Archbishop Weakland personally writes Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, regarding Fr. Murphy’s abuses of deaf boys. Fr. Murphy crimes appeared to violate the sacrament of confession, and required action by the Congregation.

**2) February 24, 1997 **—No response from the Vatican. Question of statute of limitations is raised at a meeting of Weakland with his priests, and one priest ends up going to Washington to take the case to the Papal Nuncio and request a waiver.

3) March 10, 1997–Still no response from the Vatican. Weakland writes Cardinal Agustoni, Prefect, the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura asking his intervention with Cardinal Ratzinger, saying that he had received no response to his letter of July, 1996 , and asking Agustoni’s intervention in bringing the case forward, especially as a civil action suit was being contemplated.

4) April 1, 1997-— Bertone, Ratzinger’s secretary, responds that the congregation will consider the case.

5) Jan. 12, 1998–—Fr. Murphy appeals to Cardinal Ratzinger on the basis of age and the fact that he’s living in the diocese of Superior. The bishop there is proceeding with charges against him, representing Milwaukee, based on the canon law statues of 1962 .

6) April 6, 1998-–Bertone, Ratzinger’s secretary, writes Bishop Fliss, head of the Superior diocese in which Murphy was living, who was familiar with the case, and advises ‘pastoral measures’ in view of Murphy’s advanced age. Bishop Sklba of Superior emphatically rejects these suggestions.

7) May 13, 1998-–Bishop Sklba writes Bertone, Ratzinger’s secretary, saying ”…all reasonable pastoral methods have been exhausted…the scandal and sense of injustice that pervades the deaf Catholic community is of such a level that demands the careful administration of justice…”
**
8) May 15, 1998–**- Pre-trial proceedings begin.

9) August 15, 1998—Bishops Fliss of Milwaukee and Sklba of Superior meet with Bertone at the Vatican. Cardinal Ratzinger’s representative, Bertone, hopes that “the priest…will…cooperate…in the solution…which will favor the good of souls and avoid scandal.”

10) August 19, 1998—Bishop Sklba abates the trial, probably because of Murphy’s decllining health.

11) Sept 2, 1998-–Fr. Murphy dies and is buried by his family as a priest.

12) Sept. 10, 1998—Weakland writes a personal apology to a representative of the deaf community. There is no public apology.

13) Sept. 28, 1998—Bertone, representing Cardinal Ratzinger, writes to Weakland, closing the case and “hoping that the Church will be spared any undue publicity in this matter.”