No I did not say the abuse was o.k. I am saying that it is very hard to glean all the facts of an case when the incident involved happened 40 years ago. And that a response when the evidence is fresh may differ when it is brought to somebody’s attention 40 years later.
If you go to the link to Bishop Accountability it lays out the facts as known. This site is dedicated to exposing the failure of Bishops to act in protecting children. So I hope you would find it objective.
The priest had been removed from public ministry by the Diocese around 1974(I don’t know if it was only in ministry involving children or not).
While the priest was outside of the diocese in 1994 it was found he was still working in public ministry. Now although he was not in Mil. he still was under the authority of that Bishop, who was Weakland at the time. The Bishop could have recalled Murphy and placed him under discipline and removed him from his duties and kept him in Mil. But instead the Bishop, who along with the previous bishops had already been criticized for the handling of Murphy decided to play CYA and ask the Vatican to defrock the priest.
If protecting children was the goal. And I agree it must be. But defrocking the priest would not have done this as much as recalling him from outside the diocese to be subject to canonical discipline and retired from public ministerial life.
If things had been handled correctly the guy would have been brought to the attention of the Vatican in 1974. But at that time sex abuse cases were not excusively handled by CDF but were handled by the dioceses.