Deaf Defendant Includes Pope in Sex-Abuse Suit

By virtue of his past and present vaunted positions in the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI has certainly had to deal with the ramifications of the wide-ranging sex abuse scandal that’s still rocking the Vatican. But now the pontiff has actually been named in a lawsuit filed by Terry Kohut, who alleges that he was sexually abused for years by Father Lawrence C. Murphy, the headmaster of St. John’s School for the Deaf, in Milwaukee, Wis. –KA

CNN’s Belief Blog:

When Kohut was barely a teen, and for years afterward, he says, he was sexually molested and assaulted by the headmaster and priest of the school where he lived, St. John’s School for the Deaf, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What occurred there is one of the most notorious cases of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

Kohut was not alone. From 1950 to 1974 the headmaster of St. Johns, Father Lawrence C. Murphy, raped and molested as many as 200 deaf boys, according to court and church documents.

Kohut has now filed the first sex-abuse lawsuit against the Vatican actually naming Pope Benedict, previously known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as a defendant.

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