NEW YORK TIMES: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope and archbishop in Munich at the time, was copied on a memo that informed him that a priest, whom he had approved sending to therapy in 1980 to overcome pedophilia, would be returned to pastoral work within days of beginning psychiatric treatment. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another parish. MORE
TIMES ONLINE: Pope Benedict XVI was drawn deeper yesterday into the clerical sex abuse scandal that has begun to overwhelm the Roman Catholic 
Church, when he was accused of personally failing to take action against a serial paedophile. The Pope was blamed directly for ignoring repeated pleas by senior American churchmen to take action against a priest who had molested up to 200 deaf boys. Father Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at the St John’s School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin, from 1950 to 1974, starting as a teacher and rising to director, allegedly molested scores of pupils, preying on his victims in their dormitories and on class trips. But instead of being defrocked and the police called in, it is alleged that Father Murphy avoided justice and remained a member of the Church after a key intervention by the Pope — then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Murphy was quietly moved to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974 and spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes and schools. He died in 1998 at the age of 72, still a priest. MORE
NEW YORK TIMES: ROME — Even as Pope Benedict XVI, faced with a sexual abuse scandal spreading across Europe, has called on victims to come forward and urged clerics to cooperate with civil justice, those strong words are running up against the complexities of his past. “He is at a crossroads,” said Marco Politi, a veteran Italian Vatican journalist. “What’s extraordinary is that the scandal has reached the heart of the center of the church. Up to now it was far away — in the States, in Canada, in Brazil, in Australia. Then it came to Europe, to Ireland. “Then it came to his motherland,” Mr. Politi added of Benedict’s native Germany. “Then it came to his diocese, and now it’s coming to the heart of the government of the church — and he has to give an answer.” MORE
WASHINGTON POST: ST. FRANCIS, Wis. — 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, was one of about 200 deaf boys at the school who say they were molested by the late priest decades ago in a case now creating a scandal for the Vatican and threatening to ensnare Pope Benedict XVI. “Father Murphy put everything into the context of God,” Geier said through a sign-language interpreter Thursday. “I felt like I was really brainwashed.” Some allegations became public years ago. But they received renewed attention this week after documents obtained by The New York Times showed Murphy was spared a defrocking in the mid-1990s because he was protected by the Vatican office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now the pope. MORE
ABC NEWS: So tonight, we ask: Should the Pope resign? Some might say that would be a beautiful and historic act of penance in the name of the Church, for a sin that has reached so many places in the Church. Or would resigning the Papacy be considered a surrender to secular forces — and a secular media — simply out to attack the Church? MORE