Fr. Thomas Brundage.
Posted on 03/30/2010 4:13:56 PM PDT by NYer
.- Reports in the New York Times and other media about a Wisconsin priest who sexually abused deaf children have been “sloppy and inaccurate,” the then-judicial vicar of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee has said. Correcting the public record, he said the claim Pope Benedict XVI was involved in the case is “a huge leap of logic.”
Fr. Thomas Brundage, JLC, former judicial vicar of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, wrote in Anchorage, Alaska’s Catholic Anchor about the case of Fr. Lawrence Murphy, a principal of St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee.
About 200 former students have said they were molested by Fr. Murphy, sometimes even in the confessional. Outlets such as the Associated Press claim that the priest was “spared a defrocking in the mid-1990s” because he was allegedly “protected by the Vatican office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,” who is now Pope Benedict XVI.
According to Fr. Brundage, this claim was based on an archbishop’s letter which inaccurately claimed the case had been “abated.” In reality, the accused priest was still a defendant in a church trial.
In a further inaccuracy, recent media reports have failed to understand that the ability to hear cases of sexual abuse of minors shifted from the Roman Rota to Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) only in 2001. While cases would “languish” in the Rota, the CDF handled cases “expeditiously, fairly, and with due regard to the rights of all the parties involved.”
“I have no doubt that this was the work of then-Cardinal Ratzinger,” Fr. Brundage insisted.
In his view, Pope Benedict XVI has in fact “done more than any other pope or bishop in history to rid the Catholic Church of the scourge of child sexual abuse and provide for those who have been injured.”
The priest said he felt the need to tell the story of the Murphy trial from the beginning. He especially protested that his comments about the Murphy case have been “liberally and often inaccurately quoted in the New York Times and in more than 100 other newspapers and on-line periodicals.”
“As I have found that the reporting on this issue has been inaccurate and poor in terms of the facts, I am also writing out of a sense of duty to the truth,” he continued. “The fact that I presided over this trial and have never once been contacted by any news organization for comment speaks for itself.”
Fr. Brundage explained the case’s back story, which he said has not been reported.
In 1996 the Archdiocese of Milwaukee revisited the allegations against Fr. Murphy because of “courageous advocacy” on behalf of the victims and their wives. While the existence of a scandal at the school during Fr. Murphy’s 1950-1974 tenure had been “common knowledge” the details were “sketchy.”
However, when the case was revisited it became obvious the archdiocese needed to take “strong and swift action” about the decades-old wrongs, Fr. Brundage reported. The then-Archbishop Rembert Weakland consented to an investigation into the child abuse allegations against Fr. Murphy and his alleged solicitation within the confessional.
As judicial vicar, Fr. Brundage conducted “gut-wrenching” interviews with the deaf victims, including one who had become a perpetrator of abuse himself.
“I also met with a community board of deaf Catholics. They insisted that Fr. Murphy should be removed from the priesthood and highly important to them was their request that he be buried not as a priest but as a layperson,” he wrote in the Catholic Anchor. “I indicated that [as] a judge, I could not guarantee the first request and could only make a recommendation to the latter request.”
In the summer of 1998, acting as judicial vicar he ordered Fr. Murphy to be present at a deposition at the Milwaukee chancery. A letter from the clergyman’s doctor said he was in frail health and could not travel far. The priest died of natural causes a week later.
Fr. Brundage also addressed the case’s documentation and recent reports about it in his Catholic Anchor article.
An August 19 letter from Archbishop Weakland to then-secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone stated that the Milwaukee archbishop had instructed Fr. Brundage to “abate the proceedings” against the accused priest.
“Father Murphy, however, died two days later and the fact is that on the day that Father Murphy died, he was still the defendant in a church criminal trial. No one seems to be aware of this,” the priest wrote in the Catholic Anchor.
Had he been asked to abate the trial, Fr. Brundage said he “most certainly” would have insisted on appeal to the supreme court of the Church or to Pope John Paul II if necessary.
Discussing the role of then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Fr. Brundage said he had “no reason to believe that he was involved at all.”
“Placing this matter at his doorstep is a huge leap of logic and information,” he continued.
Fr. Brundage added that media reports have attributed to him statements from the documents which were not in his handwriting, saying their source was “unknown” to him.
“Discerning truth takes time and it is apparent that the New York Times, the Associated Press and others did not take the time to get the facts correct,” he charged.
Citing his experience as a volunteer prison chaplain in Alaska, Fr. Brundage offered a blistering profile of convicted sexual abusers and the priests who have committed “such grievous actions”:
“They tend to be very smart and manipulative. They tend to be well liked and charming. They tend to have one aim in life — to satisfy their hunger. Most are highly narcissistic and do not see the harm that they have caused. They view the children they have abused not as people but as objects. They rarely show remorse and moreover, sometimes portray themselves as the victims.
“They are, in short, dangerous people and should never be trusted again.”
From his interviews with victims, he realized that the “disease” of abuse is “virulent and easily transmitted to others.”
“I heard stories of distorted lives, sexualities diminished or expunged. These were the darkest days of my own priesthood, having been ordained less than 10 years at the time.”
He declared abuse to be “a form of emotional and spiritual homicide.”
Fr. Brundage said that Catholic dioceses in the U.S. have taken “extraordinary steps” to ensure the safety of children and the vulnerable. In his present home, the Archdiocese of Anchorage, he reported that almost every public bathroom in parishes has a sign asking if a person has been abused by anyone in the church and a phone number is given to report abuse. Almost all church workers are required to take yearly classes on ensuring a safe environment.
“I am not sure what more the Church can do,” he said.
He concluded his article in the Catholic Anchor by saying Fr. Murphy’s sexual abuse of minors and solicitation in the confessional were “unmitigated and gruesome crimes.”
“On behalf of the church, I am deeply sorry and ashamed for the wrongs that have been done by my brother priests but realize my sorrow is probably of little importance 40 years after the fact. The only thing that we can do at this time is to learn the truth, beg for forgiveness, and do whatever is humanly possible to heal the wounds.
“The rest, I am grateful, is in God’s hands.”
The MSM is LYING to us???
And some folks on FR are swallowing it hook, line, and sinker???
No Way!!!
I too am dumbfounded!
The MSM is fibbing about the Church Christ founded and anti-Catholic Freepers have been EASILY suckered?
Shocking, I say, shocking!
They always attack the Church during Holy Week. As is seen here, they will make things up, if necessary, to do so.
you forgot the </sarcasm>
Setting the record straight in the case of abusive Milwaukee priest Father Lawrence Murphy
Long Applause for New York Prelate Who Defends Pope
NYT UNFAIRLY CITES POPE'S ROLE [Catholic Caucus]
Scoundrel Time(s)
The Pope and the Murphy case: what the New York Times story didn't tell you
The district attorney declined to prosecute. Unless you think that the Church has the DA in its pocket (something I would seriously doubt) you can't lay that at the Church's door.
Shhhhh, you know facts upset them.
I guess the ‘Old Grey Lady’ didn’t want to be confused by the facts, so the NY Times reporter didn’t even bother trying to contact the person who was ‘quoted’ in the article.
That would have been a matter for the civil courts, but it is my understanding that the justice system in Milwaukee also dropped the ball on this one.
Oops! Didn’t read far enough down. I see now that you had addressed that issue.
You defense of those who rape children is astounding.
Prior to the '80's, as a rule, when these crime were committed, police didn't arrest, victims didn't/wouldn't testify, prosecutors didn't bring charges --it was an intricate system of evasions everywhere you turned, involving not just the churches, but every "helping" profession: counselors, youth workers, psychologists, judges, school administrators, therapists, public officials.
It was very much the muddled smooth-it-over "compassionate" thinking of the times: don't "re-traumatize" the victims by forcing them to provide courtroom testimony, what they need is counseling; don't "criminalize" the abusers, they need counseling as well; don't create a public spectable that envelops the church (the scouts, the sports program, the deaf school) because it destroys people's confidence in the helping institutions, etc. ad nauseam.
Now we can well say we're angry and disgusted with it all, and we know better: but for a long time this was not the way any institution, public or private, religious or secular, operated.
Now the thinking is more along these lines (paraphrase from my retired pastor): "First call the police, then the bishop--- then the press."
There is plenty of shame, guilt, bad judgment and anger to go around. It's 20-20 hindsight. How we wish ALL the offenders were tried on criminal charges and locked away from the kids forever.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to say that.
This Pope has done more than ANYONE in the Church to reign in this horror. He sent word to ALL the Bishops Conferences to clean up their Seminaries, so as to stop the attitudes that led to this abuse. What our Bishops Conference, has not admitted, and from what I've read, NONE of the other Conferences have done so either, is that much of the abuse against pre-teen or teenaged boys by done by priests who were active homosexuals. The attempt to portray this as pedophilia is a smokescreen for the majority of the abuse. Political correctness has kept them from stating THAT fact.
I don't know about other countries, but in the US, the Bishops have started moving on those Seminaries that allowed men they KNEW to be active homosexuals into the studies for the priesthood, and some were ordained. This Pope has stated that men who are active homosexuals should NOT be allowed to become priests. Thankfully, the Bishops have begun to listen.
Precisely. The media is trying to judge the Church on present day standards, when those were not in effect ANYWHERE when most of this abuse took place. And again, to clarify, this is NOT a defense of those who perpetrated these horrors on young people, but it’s a point of clarification of why the Church should not be singled out for wrongdoing, when it was doing nothing differently than any other institution of its day and time.
FReepers ordinarily are very wary of press reports because, as we well know, they are often biased or outright fraudulent in support of a particular political axe (usually liberal).
You suspend your disbelief because you want the worst to be true. I don't venture into your motivations for that desire.
But when you not only slander the Pope and the Church, but turn on your fellow FReepers as "defending those who rape children", you are "making it personal".
And by allowing yourself to react like Pavlov's dog not only to every slanderous media report, but to slander in turn those who try to point out the errors in those reports, you are betraying everything that Free Republic and free speech stands for.
You should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.
Children were raped and the church covered it up. Those are facts which you and others like to refer to as slander.
You say that my personal involvement in the issue is blinding me? And you are not personally involved? Is it not your church that is at the center of the controversy?
Like Pavlov’s dog? And now you blame the victims?
Let me ask you American Mother, how big is your millstone?
Luke 17:2
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.