Free Republic

What must it feel like to have lost 50 years of your life? For that is what 61-year old Arthur Budzinski has endured. Five long decades of personal pain. And he has to rely on others to speak of his anguish. It is made worse by the fact that no-one has been held to account for the sexual abuse he says he suffered as a child while at the Roman Catholic St John's School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin. Arthur and around 200 other boys are said to have been sexually abused at the school by Father Lawrence...

ST. FRANCIS, Wis. (AP) -- Steven Geier says that four times in the mid-1960s, the Rev. Lawrence Murphy coaxed the then-14-year-old student into a closet at St. John's School for the Deaf just outside Milwaukee and molested him, using God to justify his actions. Geier said when he told Murphy what was happening was wrong, the priest replied, "Oh, yes. God sent me. This is confession." Geier, now 59 and living in Madison....

Questions are being raised about whether Pope Benedict was personally involved in covering up a case of child sex abuse by a Roman Catholic priest. Documents seen by the New York Times newspaper allege that in the 1990s, long before he became Pope, he failed to respond to letters about a US case. Fr Lawrence Murphy, of Wisconsin, was accused of abusing up to 200 deaf boys. Defending itself, the Vatican said US civil authorities had investigated and dropped the case. For more than 20 years before he was made Pope, Joseph Ratzinger led the Congregation for the Doctrine of...