Sex-abuse cases in US, elsewhere taint papacy

March 26, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

VATICAN CITY

Revelations that the Vatican halted the investigation of a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys have eerie echoes in Italy, where 67 deaf men and women accused two dozen priests of raping and molesting children for years.

Only now — a year after the Italian case became public — is the Vatican directing the diocese to interview the victims to hear their testimony about the accusations, The Associated Press learned Thursday.

The two cases are the latest in a burgeoning abuse scandal on both sides of the Atlantic that now threatens to tarnish the papacy itself. The office charged with disciplining clergy was long led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and a church prosecution in the Wisconsin case was stopped after an appeal to Ratzinger.

The Vatican strongly defended Benedict on Thursday and denounced what it said was a concerted campaign to smear him and his aides for a problem that Rome insists is not unique to the Catholic Church.

Benedict’s actions have been marked by “transparency, firmness and severity in shedding light on the various cases of sexual abuse committed by priests and clergymen,” the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said in a front-page article.

The Vatican was responding to the release of documents, first reported by The New York Times, that showed how the pope’s former office told a Wisconsin bishop to shut down a church trial against the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, a Milwaukee priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys from 1950 to 1975.

Murphy died in 1998, two years after Ratzinger first learned of the accusations, and more than 20 years after they came to the attention of the Milwaukee diocese.