A report from Arizona tells how the late Tucson Bishop manual D Moreno struggled to get authorization from then Cardinal Ratzinger at the CDF to defrock a convicted abusive priest.
The late Bishop Manuel D. Moreno pleaded with the future pope for help.
In one case, Moreno pleaded with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, for help in removing the Rev. Michael Teta, who was convicted by the church in 1997 of five crimes including sexual solicitation in the confessional.
"I make this plea to you to assist me in every way you can to expedite this case, because the accused was a priest in whom I had great confidence at one time, but who, unfortunately, worked among our former seminarians, and, terrible to say, evidently corrupted many of them," Moreno wrote in an April 1997 letter to Ratzinger.
The report as published presents yet another case where Pope Benedict, as head of the CDF, was clearly involved in dealing with a clear case of abuse by a convicted priest, but did no intervene to remove him from presenting a continuing danger to children, in spite of pleading and warnings of future abuse from the local ordinary.
