Mother of Sex Abuse Victim Says Pope Is 'Lying'

March 25, 2010— -- Senior Vatican officials, including the current pope, refused to punish a priest who sexually assaulted as many as 200 deaf boys over the course of three decades, despite calls for disciplinary measures from two American bishops.

Documents from a lawsuit brought by the priest's now adult victims against the Milwaukee Diocese, and initially obtained by the New York Times, record the Rev. Lawrence Murphy admitting to diocese officials in the 1990s that he molested dozens of boys while working at St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisc., for 25 years from 1950 to 1975.

The documents also include letters during the 1990s from two Wisconsin bishops to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, asking for permission to prosecute Murphy in a church trial. Ratzinger at the time headed the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the church's disciplinary office.

The office initially authorized a secret church trial for Murphy, but the trial was halted after the priest wrote a letter to Ratzinger asking for mercy.

Sex scandals have been roiling the Catholic Church for nearly a decade, but the Milwaukee case is the closest the scandals have come to tainting the Pope. The Murphy revelations also come as the Pope's handling of sex scandals in Germany and Ireland has been questioned.

"The goal of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was to keep this secret," said Peter Isely, Milwaukee-based director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, during a protest today outside the Vatican.

"We need to know why he (the pope) did not let us know about him (Murphy) and why he didn't let the police know about him and why he did not condemn him and why he did not take his collar away from him," Isely said.

In Milwaukee, the mother of one of the abused boys, accused the Pope of "lying" through his apologies and said the Church needed to be held accountable.

"There should be no institution that is not accountable for what they do, that is able to hide behind the faith. You know the Catholic Church is very powerful and that should not be," Lynn Pilmaier told reporters. "The Pope, you know, he is lying. I mean his false apologies."