EDITOR’S NOTE: The follow ing are excerpts from a statement by Cardinal William J. Levada, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
I AM not proud of America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, as a para gon of fairness.
[Monday’s] Times presents both a lengthy article by Laurie Goodstein (“Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest”) and an accompanying editorial in which the editors call the article a “disturbing report” as a basis for their own charges against the pope. Both the article and the editorial are deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness.
In her lead paragraph, Goodstein relies on what she describes as “newly unearthed files” to point out what the Vatican (i.e. then-Cardinal Ratzinger and his Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) did not do — “defrock Father Murphy.” Breaking news, apparently.
Only after eight paragraphs of purple prose does Goodstein reveal that Murphy, who criminally abused as many as 200 deaf children while working at a school in the Milwaukee Archdiocese from 1950 to 1974, “not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims.”
But in paragraph 13, commenting on a statement of Father Lombardi (the Vatican spokesman) that church law does not prohibit anyone from reporting cases of abuse to civil authorities, Goodstein writes, “He did not address why that had never happened in this case.” Did she forget, or did her editors not read, what she wrote in paragraph nine about Murphy getting “a pass from the police and prosecutors”? By her own account, it seems clear that criminal authorities had been notified, most probably by the victims and their families.
Goodstein’s account bounces back and forth as if there were not some 20-plus years intervening between reports in the 1960s and ’70s to the Archdiocese and local police, and Archbishop Weakland’s appeal for help to the Vatican in 1996. Why? Because the point of the article is not about failures on the part of church and civil authorities to act properly at the time.
Looking back, I agree that Father Murphy deserved to be dismissed from the clerical state for his egregious criminal behavior, which would normally have resulted from a canonical trial. The point of Goodstein’s article, however, is to attribute the failure to accomplish this dismissal to Pope Benedict, instead of to diocesan decisions at the time.
Let me tell you what I think a fair reading of the Milwaukee case would seem to indicate. The reasons why church and civil authorities took no action in the 1960s and ’70s is apparently not contained in these “newly emerged files.” Nor does the Times seem interested in finding out why.
But what does emerge is this: After almost 20 years as archbishop, Weakland wrote to the Congregation asking for help in dealing with this terrible case of serial abuse. The Congregation approved his decision to undertake a canonical trial, since the case involved solicitation in confession — one of the graviora delicta (most grave crimes) for which the Congregation had responsibility to investigate and take appropriate action.
Only when it learned that Murphy was dying did the Congregation suggest that the trial be suspended, since it would involve a lengthy process of taking testimony from a number of deaf victims from prior decades, as well as from the accused priest. Instead, it proposed appropriate restrictions on his ministry.
Goodstein infers that this action implies “leniency.” My interpretation would be that the Congregation realized that the complex canonical process would be useless if the priest were dying.
Indeed, I have recently received an unsolicited letter from the presiding judge in the canonical trial telling me that he never received any communication about suspending the trial, and would not have agreed to it. But Father Murphy had died in the meantime.
Goodstein also refers to what she calls “other accusations” about the reassignment of a priest who had previously abused a child/children in another diocese by the Archdiocese of Munich. But the Archdiocese has repeatedly explained that the responsible Vicar General, Monsignor Gruber, admitted his mistake in making that assignment.
It is anachronistic for Goodstein and the Times to imply that the knowledge about sexual abuse that we have in 2010 should have somehow been intuited by those in authority in 1980. It is not difficult for me to think that Professor Ratzinger, appointed as archbishop of Munich in 1977, would have done as most new bishops do: allow those already in place in an administration of 400 or 500 people to do the jobs assigned to them.
The Times editorial wonders “how Vatican officials did not draw the lessons of the grueling scandal in the United States, where more than 700 priests were dismissed over a three-year period.” I can assure the Times that the Vatican in reality did not then and does not now ignore those lessons.
But the Times editorial goes on to show the usual bias: “But then we read Laurie Goodstein’s disturbing report . . . about how the pope, while he was still a cardinal, was personally warned about a priest . . . But church leaders chose to protect the church instead of children. The report illuminated the kind of behavior the church was willing to excuse to avoid scandal.”
Excuse me: Even the Goodstein article places the words about protecting the church from scandal on the lips of Archbishop Weakland, not the pope.
It is just this kind of anachronistic conflation that I think warrants my accusation that the Times, in rushing to a guilty verdict, lacks fairness in its coverage of Pope Benedict.