Cooperating with intrinsic evil?

I saw a story today in the news - at Politics Daily by David Gibson, at Reuter's FaithWorld, The Guardian, at dotCommonweal, also by David Gibson, Articles of Faith at the Times, and The New York Times story, with the timeline and the document trail.

The dotCommonweal post is worth reading for the comments made to it, but I'll post here part of what David Gibson wrote at Politics Daily .....

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[...] a story is in Thursday's New York Times, and it is shocking: That top Vatican officials, including Benedict, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and chief guardian of doctrine for Rome, did not take action, despite pleas from some American bishops, against a Wisconsin priest who molested hundreds of deaf boys.

"The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal. . . .

"The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.

"In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee's archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican's secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy's dismissal.

"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."

This is not an isolated story .....

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I keep hoping if everyone writes about this awful stuff, it won't just get overlooked with a "business as usual" attitude, that it will lead to substantive change in the Church. I doubt that it will, though :(