THE US has allowed its diplomatic service to be used on behalf of a Chicago man to serve court papers on the Vatican, suing Pope Benedict, Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and his predecessor, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, in connection with clerical child sex abuse.
The papers allege all three conspired to keep silent an abuse allegations against Fr Lawrence Murphy at St John’s School for the Deaf, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The priest, who died in 1998, admitted abusing 34 children there.
An attempt last January to serve the same papers on the Vatican through the more usual Federal Express failed. Msgr Brian Wells of the Vatican secretariat of state refused them, saying they were “undesired and unwanted”.
Terry Kohut, the man bringing the action, was a student at St John’s in the 1970s, and is one of an estimated 200 deaf students who it is claimed were sexually abused by the then director of the school Fr Murphy.
In a diplomatic note accompanying the court papers, which it conveyed to the Vatican’s secretariat of state on April 4th last, the US embassy to the Holy See pointed out that under US law the defendant (in this instance the Pope and the two cardinals) must respond within 60 days of the papers being served “or face the possibility of having judgment entered against it without the opportunity of presenting evidence or arguments on its behalf”.
Jeff Anderson, Mr Kohut’s lawyer, described the earlier refusal by the Vatican to receive the papers as “an appalling and inexcusable slight to survivors, but consistent with the Catholic Church hierarchy’s tactics of deceit, delay and denial”.
On confirmation the papers had been served, he said it would be “interesting to see what new tactic for delay they will come up with”.
In 1996 the then archbishop of Milwaukee, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, complained about Fr Murphy in a letter to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope, was prefect.
In 1997 the congregation instructed Archbishop Weakland to hold a canonical trial into the allegations against Fr Murphy.
It then changed its mind following a plea from the priest. The Vatican cited Fr Murphy’s advanced age, failing health and lack of further allegations for stopping the trial.
Mr Kohut wrote letters directly to Cardinal Sodano in 1995, reporting he had been abused by Fr Murphy.
When the Vatican refused the court papers last January, Mr Anderson called on the current archbishop of New York, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, to get involved. Archbishop Dolan, who recently led the apostolic visitation to Ireland’s seminaries, had been archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009.
