Apparently there were some allegations against a Milwaukee priest in 1974, and the Church transferred him elsewhere. Additional action was considered in 1996, before the priest died in 1998. The paper reports:
But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.Leftist-atheist religion-haters are going nuts with this, such as Hitchens.
This is ridiculous. It is a complaint about how someone 14 years ago may or may not have handled something that may or may not have happened 36 years ago. It is not possible to find out the facts. Whatever happened, it could not have been that bad, or someone would have complained before now. The only reason anyone is complaining now is that there are some opportunistic lawyers in Wisconsin who are suing for a lot of money. Maybe the complainers just made the allegations up in order to collect millions of dollars in court.
There are reasons why we have statutes of limitations. There are also reasons for a presumption of innocence. Nothing good is going to come out of this story.
It is disturbing how people uncritically accept these dubious accusations. It is somewhat similar to how the news media has accepted wacky stories of Toyota runaway acceleration, even tho the last one was shown to be a hoax.
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