By Tom Murray
Today's TMJ
March 30, 2010
http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/89555422.html
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MILWAUKEE – Marquette’s Daniel Maguire, a religious ethics professor, knows what he has to say goes against what leaders at his university want to hear.
"I met the Pope when he was a Cardinal and he made it clear he did not agree with me on everything,” Maguire told TODAY’S TMJ4 reporter Tom Murray.
Maguire, a former priest, is calling for Pope Benedict to step down.
"That is for two clear reasons,” he said. “Number one, the crime. Number two, the cover up."
In Maguire’s latest editorial that first appeared on consortiumnews.com, Maguire describes Milwaukee as the new epicenter of clergy abuse.
Before becoming Pope, there are claims that then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's abuse oversight panel did not take steps to remove Father Lawrence Murphy from the priesthood. Murphy is suspected of molesting some 200 boys at a St. Francis school for the deaf from 1950 to 1974.
“In order to preserve the dignity of the church, those crimes were covered up systematically,” Maguire said. “What this case illustrates is that the cover up extended all the way from the Vatican to the local church.”
Maguire stands in sharp contrast to Archbishop Listecki, who has praised the Pope’s efforts to eradicate pedophile priests.
"This Pope really did recognize that response and he was part of the forefront of that reformation,” Listecki said this week.
Marquette has taken an official position denouncing Maguire’s remarks.
“Marquette University disagrees with Professor Daniel Maguire’s recent call for the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI,” the school’s statement reads. “On occasion Dr. Maguire has enunciated positions that are not consonant with formal Church teaching and with which the university takes issue. However, the university acknowledges Dr. Maguire’s right to comment -- both as a tenured professor of theology and as a private citizen.”
Maguire said he has been on Marquette’s faculty for 39 years.
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