Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused 200 Boys

OMG!! It's getting impossible to not write about the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal - and the involvement of the current Pope in it - only once a day or less frequently. The bombshell's just keep on coming and the rot, moral bankruptcy and callousness of these narcissistic "men of God" is truly beyond belief. And amazingly, these same foul individuals have the nerve to condemn normal gays and condemn committed, loving same sex relationships? Now the New York Times has yet another story that traces abuse and cover up right to Pope Benedict XVI's feet and demonstrates where the Church's reputation was more important than the lives of 200 boys molested by a predator priest. While it is true other religious denominations have their own abuse problems, it is difficult to believe that any but the Roman Catholic Church made the policy of cover up such a highly sanctioned policy. For me, as a former Catholic, the hypocrisy of the hierarchy is mind numbing. These nasty old men scared young children into thinking that they would go to Hell for eating meat on Friday and tiny infractions, while this bullshit of molestations and cover ups was going on for decades. Documents related to the story can be found here. It utterly disgusts me. Here are some highlights:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The New York Times obtained the documents, 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. 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.
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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. He did not address why that had never happened in this case.
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He [Fr. Murphy] 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.
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Obviously, with this new disclosure - and more may well be coming - Benedict XVI needs to resign. As for rank and file Catholics, they need to admit to themselves that for most of their lives they have been duped into following the directives of very sick and evil men. Trying to assure themselves that other institutions have similar problems or that "the media is out to get the Church" is only more self-delusion. It does not and cannot change the reality of the institutional Church's utter moral degeneracy.