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 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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/world/europe/25vatican.html?hp

--- Xnews/5.04.25
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