Vatican cardinal defends Pope

A top Vatican official strongly defended the church's decision not to defrock a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting deaf boys, saying the lengthy trial process would have been "useless" because the priest was dying.

In an article posted on the Vatican's website Wednesday, Cardinal William Levada strongly criticized The New York Times, which first reported on internal documents in the case last week. He said the paper wrongly used the documents to find fault in Pope Benedict XVI's handling of abuse cases.

The Vatican's handling of the case involving the Rev. Lawrence Murphy has fuelled claims by victims of clerical abuse that the Vatican in general, and Benedict in particular, were more concerned about protecting the church than children.

Murphy was accused of molesting as many as 200 deaf boys in the confessional, in dormitories, in closets and during field trips while working at a Milwaukee-area school for the deaf from the 1950s through 1974. He died in 1998 at age 72.

In his article, dated March 26, Levada wrote that Murphy should have been defrocked in the 1960s and '70s for his "egregious criminal behavior." But he noted that when accusations first arose during that time period, police and diocesan officials took no action against Murphy.

Two decades later, when the Vatican first heard about the case, the Congregation suggested the canonical trial that had been initiated against Murphy by his diocese in 1996 be suspended because he was dying, Levada wrote. Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, led the Congregation at the time.

"My interpretation would be that the Congregation realized that the complex canonical process would be useless if the priest were dying," Levada wrote.

In his article, Levada noted that the judge who was handling the case for the diocese, the Rev. Thomas Brundage, had recently said he would have appealed the decision to suspend the trial, but that Murphy died, making the question moot.

In an article on his diocesan website, Brundage points out that because he had never received the instruction to suspend the trial, Murphy actually died as a defendant in a church criminal trial.

The Vatican has been on the defensive ever since the Times story was published, lashing out at what it has called a smear campaign against the pope and denouncing suggestions that he wanted to let abusers off the hook. Levada's article marks the highest-level official response to the story to date.

Levada praised Benedict for what he called his "pro-active" hand in reforming church policies concerning cases of sexual abuse.

The reforms, outlined in a 2001 Vatican document Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, streamlined the church's administrative process for dealing with such cases, allowed for the Vatican to waive the statute of limitations and gave new resources for dioceses to obtain uniform advice from Rome on how to proceed, Levada said.

The document, he assured, does not remove a local bishop's responsibility from acting against an accused priest.

"Nor was it, as some have theorized, part of a plot from on high to interfere with civil jurisdiction in such cases," he said.

Rather, it directed bishops to send the cases to Rome for review.

Levada did not mention that a letter the former Cardinal Ratzinger sent to bishops in 2001 noted that cases involving allegations of abuse were "subject to the pontifical secret."

Victims groups have charged that such an instruction to keep the cases secret amounted to a coverup. The Vatican insists there was nothing in the documents that precluded reporting to civil authorities.