Before reading this article we invite you to read the article Sexual Abuse in the Churches posted on this website as it will give you a better understanding of the history of sexual abuse. In our letter of April 4, 1988 to James Hayes, Archbishop of Halifax, Nova Scotia, we wrote the following.
"Not only are some of the people, but also some of your popes, bishops and priests of your institution homosexuals, pedophiles, fornicators and drunkards. Some even do catch AIDS as a punishment from God, as they live a life separated from God and under the power of Satan (spirit of darkness - sin)."
Please find below a copy of a recent article that was posted on CNN.com as further confirmation how The Catholic Church is indeed The Mystery Babylon and The Mother of Harlots, as spoken of in Revelation 17:5 and as explained in the articles The Mystery Babylon and Popes and the Princes of This World listed on this website.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, cp.org, Updated: March 25, 2010 3:10 AM
Times report: Documents show Vatican was told about US priest who may have molested 200 boys.
NEW YORK - Milwaukee's Roman Catholic archbishop warned a top Vatican office led by future Pope Benedict XVI about a priest who may have molested as many as 200 deaf boys, according to documents obtained by The New York Times, but the priest never was defrocked.
The documents were provided by two lawyers who have filed lawsuits alleging the Archdiocese of Milwaukee didn't take sufficient action against the Rev. Lawrence Murphy. The priest, who died in 1998, worked at the former St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis from 1950 to 1975.
In 1996, then-Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland sent letters about Murphy to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope. Weakland received no response from Ratzinger, the Times reported.
Eight months later, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarciscio Bertone - now the Vatican's secretary of state - told the Wisconsin bishops to begin secret disciplinary proceedings, according to the documents. But Bertone halted that process after Murphy wrote to Ratzinger saying he already had repented, was ailing and that the case's statute of limitations had run out, the Times reported.
The documents contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.
Weakland also wrote to a different Vatican office in March 1997, saying an attorney's impending lawsuit would make the case public.
The documents emerged even as the Vatican deals with an ever-widening church abuse scandal sweeping several European countries. Benedict last week issued an unprecedented letter to Ireland addressing the 16 years of church cover-up scandals here. But he has yet to say anything about his handling of a case in Germany known to have developed when, as cardinal, he oversaw the Munich Archdiocese from 1977 to 1982.
The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a spokesman for the Vatican, told the Times in a written statement that the Vatican did not receive Murphy's case until 1996 years after civil authorities investigated and dropped it. Lombardi also said Murphy's poor health and a lack of more recent allegations were factors in the decision not to defrock him. He noted "the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties."
The Times obtained the Murphy documents from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, attorneys for five men who have sued the Milwaukee archdiocese alleging fraud. The newspaper said the documents included letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims' affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican.
Anderson said he would email the documents to The Associated Press on Thursday.
He said in a phone interview Wednesday night that they show the Vatican was more concerned about possible publicity than about the abuse allegations.
"Instead of removing him from the priesthood, they just gave him a free pass," Anderson said. "In this case, it's a free pass at the highest level."
After Murphy was removed from the school in 1974, he went to northern Wisconsin, where he spent the rest of his life working in parishes, schools and, according to one lawsuit, a juvenile detention centre.
Previously released court documents show Weakland oversaw a 1993 evaluation of Murphy that concluded the priest likely assaulted up to 200 students at the school.
Weakland resigned as archbishop in 2002 after admitting the archdiocese secretly paid $450,000 to a man who accused him of sexual abuse.
The next day the following article appeared in The New York Times. As you read it keep in mind the use of the word 'Father' as spoken of in Matthew 23:9.
"And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven."
In 2 Cor. 11:12 God teaches us that they are false apostles who have transformed themselves into the apostles of Christ. We invite you to study all of the pages and articles of this website as the Word of God is truth and our message of repentance is the same message as it was preached by Christ and the apostles.
While we are preparing this article for our website, the Catholic Church is celebrating so-called Holy Week amidst the controversy of all the sexual abuse scandals throughout the world. There is no such thing as Holy Week. Only the temple of God is holy (1 Cor. 3:17). Words like 'father' and 'holy', along with all the other scriptural references they use, were all stolen from the Bible (John 10:1).
By Laurie Goodstein and David Callender from The New York Times - March 26, 2010.
They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.
They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people.
This week, they learned that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, received letters about Father Murphy in 1996 from Archbishop Robert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, who said that the deaf community needed "a healing response from the Church." The Vatican sat on the case, equivocated, and when Father Murphy died in 1998, he died a priest.
"That man should have been in prison for a very long time, but he was lucky," Steven Geier, one of Father Murphy's victims, said Thursday. "What about me? I wasn't supposed to touch girls. What gave him the right to be able to do that? Father Murphy constantly thought about sex with children, and he got away with it."
Young victims of sexual abuse are often so confused, ashamed or traumatized that they wait years to report the violations. Some never say a word. One of the remarkable aspects of the Father Murphy case is that young victims began alerting the authorities in the mid-1950s, when sexual abuse was hardly even a part of the public vocabulary.
In his ranch house in Madison, where he lives with his wife, Ann, and two dachshunds, Mr. Geier said through an interpreter that he entered St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wis., when he was 9. His father had helped build a Catholic church in rural Dane County, and his aunt was a nun. His family wanted him to get a good education in a Catholic school.
Mr. Geier, now 59, said that between the ages of 14 and 15, starting around 1965, Father Murphy molested him four times in a closet at the school. The priest, a hearing man fluent in sign language, said that God wanted him to teach the boy about sex but that he had to keep it quiet because it was under the sacrament of confession. Mr. Geier said he felt sick.
"First thing in the morning," Mr. Geier said, "we took communion, and as he passed out the communion wafers, I thought about how many boys did he touch with those hands and all of the germs, all of the filth of his hands."
Father Murphy may have molested as many as 200 boys while he worked at the school from 1950 to 1974, according to the accounts of victims and a social worker hired by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to interview him.
Mr. Geier said he first tried to tell the priest at his home parish in Madison, where he served as an altar boy, in 1966 when he was just 16. But the priest, he said, told him he did not want to hear about it, and to just forget about it. He told another priest while he was still a teenager, and yet a third priest years later, after he married.
That priest, the Rev. Tom Schroeder, 72, who led Masses for the deaf in Madison from 1970 to 1992, said in an interview Friday that he remembered Mr. Geier's telling him about Father Murphy. Father Schroeder said that he told a nun, who told another nun who was a dormitory supervisor at St. John's, but that the supervisor did not believe it and nothing ever came of it. "I assumed that if enough people told her, she would finally believe it," Father Schroeder said.
Internal church correspondence unearthed in a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and given to The New York Times, which made it public this week, included a letter from the Rev. David Walsh, who served as a chaplain for the deaf in Chicago, saying that teenage students at St. John's had told him in the late 1950s about Father Murphy's abuse. Father Walsh said he told Archbishop Albert Gregory Meyer of Milwaukee, who sent Father Murphy on a retreat and then put him back in the school to undo "the harm he had done."
In the 1970s, a group of former students who were in a vocational rehabilitation program in Milwaukee began telling their hearing supervisors about Father Murphy, a sequence of events reported in two articles in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2006. Among the supervisors was John Conway, now the deputy administrator of workers' compensation for the State of Wisconsin. Mr. Conway, the students and others collected affidavits from 15 to 20 former students about Father Murphy's violations. They were granted a meeting with Archbishop William E. Cousins.
"In my extreme naïveté," said Mr. Conway in an interview on Friday, "I told them the archbishop would take care of this." He said they were surprised to find the room packed with people, including several nuns and teachers from the school, two priests who said they were representing the apostolic delegate in Chicago, and Father Murphy himself.
Arthur Budzinski and Gary Smith, two more victims of Father Murphy, said in an interview last week that they remember seeing Archbishop Cousins yell, and Father Murphy staring at the floor.
The deaf men and their advocates were told that Father Murphy, the school's director and top fund-raiser, was too valuable to be let go, so he would be given only administrative duties. They were outraged. They distributed "Wanted" posters with Father Murphy's face outside the cathedral in Milwaukee. They went to the police departments in Milwaukee, where they were told it was not the correct jurisdiction, and in St. Francis, where the school was located, Mr. Conway said. They also went to the office of E. Michael McCann, the district attorney of Milwaukee County, and spoke with his assistant, William Gardner.
"A criminal priest was an oxymoron to them," Mr. Conway said. "They said they'll refer it to the archdiocese." Calls to Mr. McCann and Mr. Gardner this week were not returned. Mr. Conway said it was only when they filed a lawsuit that the archdiocese removed Father Murphy from St. John's and sent him to northern Wisconsin to live at his family's summer house. The lawsuit was withdrawn. Mr. Smith, one of two of the plaintiffs whose cases were still within the statute of limitations, received a settlement of $2,000, he and Mr. Conway said.
Father Murphy continued working in parishes and schools, with deaf people, and leading youth retreats in the Diocese of Superior for the next 24 years.
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