An attorney in St. Paul, Minnesota today filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI regarding the ongoing sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
According to attorney Jeff Anderson, his client was a victim of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who is most notorious for abusing 200 deaf boys at St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisconsin. The victim filing the lawsuit was a student at St. John's, who had sent a letter to the Vatican in 1995 requesting that Father Murphy be defrocked. The Vatican sent no reply.
The Vatican office that oversees allegations of sexual abuse in the clergy is the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which was headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger from 1981 to 2005. Therefore the victim's ignored letter should have ended up on Ratzinger's desk. Ratzinger is the current Pope Benedict.
Ratzinger did not deign to reply to a mere victim, but what about someone higher up? What about an Archbishop, for example? The following year Milwaukee's Archbishop Rembert Weakland sent two letters to Ratzinger with exactly the same request: to defrock Murphy. Ratzinger didn't reply to those letters either. But he did have one of his staffers, Cardinal Bertone, start a canonical trial that could have led to Murphy's being defrocked.
So the canonical trial started, but it did not finish. Why not? Because Murphy then wrote to Ratzinger too, and asked that the trial be stopped. Voila, the trial stopped.
Ratzinger's record: if you're a victim, he ignores you. If you're an Archbishop, he has someone else handle it. If you're an abusive priest, your requests are granted immediately.
The lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages, and also seeks to have secret files on Fr. Murphy's case opened to the public.