US church's abuse scandal hits Pope

Pope Benedict XVI has been drawn directly into the sex abuse scandal engulfing the Catholic Church, after he failed to act as a Vatican cardinal in the 1990s against an American priest who molested up to 200 deaf boys. The then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was warned by the then archbishop of Milwaukie about a priest who had abused boys while working at a renowned US school for deaf children. The archbishop, Rembert Weakland, wrote two letters in 1996 to the future pope requesting that the Reverend Lawrence Murphy be defrocked after having admitted to his acts. The archbishop said he believed the case belonged to the Vatican doctrinal office, headed by Cardinal Ratzinger from 1981 to 2005, because he had become aware that "solicitation in the confessional might be part of the situation".