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| A Timeline of Clergy Sex Abuse in Milwaukee
San Francisco Chronicle
July 1, 2013
http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/A-timeline-of-clergy-sex-abuse-in-Milwaukee-4639806.php
MILWAUKEE (AP) — The Archdiocese of Milwaukee plans to release thousands of pages of documents related to child sexual abuse by its priests on Monday. Here is a look at key dates in the scandal drawn from the archives of The Associated Press:
1940s — Edmund Haen abuses a child while serving at St. Lawrence Church, the priest's first parish. The child, who became a priest himself for a time, tells the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the abuse in 2002.
1972 — Haen abruptly transfers from a West Bend parish that he founded in 1955 to one in Mequon. Thirty years later, a West Bend businessman tells a newspaper there that he was molested by Haen as a child.
1973 — Siegfried Widera is convicted of sexual misconduct with a boy and placed on three years of probation. Within two years, another allegation is made against him.
1976 — Widera transfers from Milwaukee to the Diocese of Orange, in southern California, at the request of Milwaukee Archbishop William Cousins. The California diocese says later that Cousins warned it of a "moral problem having to do with a boy" but provided medical information showing there was "no great risk" in allowing Widera to return to parish work.
1979 — William J. Effinger is moved from a Lake Geneva parish to one in Sheboygan without anyone in Sheboygan being told he had been accused of abuse.
1989 — The Milwaukee archdiocese starts Project Benjamin to help victims of sexual abuse. While it pays for counseling for dozens of victims over the next decade, its director later acknowledges that internal guidelines requiring reporting of sex abuse weren't always followed.
1992 — Archbishop Rembert Weakland removes Effinger from his post at Holy Name Catholic Church in Sheboygan and apologizes to parishioners during a Mass for sending Effinger there with no warning to them.
1993 — Effinger is convicted of molesting a 14-year-old boy and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died in 1996.
1995 — The Wisconsin Supreme Court rules that clergy sexual abuse victims cannot sue the church for negligence in supervising its priests; In May, Weakland announces the archdiocese has spent nearly $5.5 million because of sex abuse by priests, about 20 percent of it on legal fees.
1996 — Weakland writes to the Vatican office responsible for handling clergy abuse cases about Lawrence Murphy, who is eventually accused of molesting hundreds of boys at a school for the deaf in Milwaukee. The office is led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. The office's second-in-command Cardinal Tarciscio Bertone tells Weakland to begin secret disciplinary proceedings but then halts that process after Murphy writes to Ratzinger saying he has repented.
March 2002 — After scandal in Boston makes clergy sex abuse a national issue, Weakland announces a task force will review the handling of sexual abuse allegations in Milwaukee. The archdiocese says no priests serving in its parishes pose threats to children, but refuses to disclose whether it has received any credible allegations of abuse in the past.
April 2002 — Victims begin coming forward, filing lawsuits and police reports and speaking with local media about abuse that happened when they were children; Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann announces that he is investigating allegations brought against one priest by two people.
May 2002 — Pope John Paul II accepts Weakland's resignation after the archbishop admits a $450,000 settlement to a former Marquette University theology student who accused Weakland of sexually assaulting him more than 20 years earlier.
June 2002 — Pope John Paul II names Timothy Dolan, an auxiliary bishop in St. Louis who had headed the American seminary in Rome, as the new archbishop in Milwaukee.
August 2002 — The archdiocese says four priests involved in past sexual activity with minors are giving up their parish positions. It says with the moves, no priest with a substantiated incident of sexual abuse or inappropriate sexual contact with a minor will be serving in an active ministry position.
December 2002 — Jeff Anderson sues the archdiocese for fraud for allowing a pedophile priest to continue working and says he hopes to overturn state Supreme Court decisions that make it difficult to sue the church. The lawsuit is filed on behalf of four men and a woman who say the Rev. George Nuedling abused them as children.
January 2003 — Dolan appoints five people, including the outgoing lieutenant governor, Margaret Farrow, to a board overseeing the archdiocese's response to clergy sexual abuse; Dolan says the archdiocese knows of 39 priests with substantiated allegations of sexual abuse involving minors over the past 70 years.
May 2003 — Franklyn Becker is arrested in Wisconsin after being charged with child sex abuse crimes in California, while he was serving as a visiting priest there; Widera leaps to his death from a hotel balcony in Mexico after being charged with 42 counts of child molestation in California and Wisconsin.
November 2003 — Dolan announces the archdiocese will sell some of its property to establish a fund to compensate victims of clergy sex abuse. He says it could total about $4 million.
April 2004 — Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle signs legislation that adds clergy to the list of occupations required by state law to report suspected child abuse. However, the law does not require clergy to report abuse if the information is gathered in private conversations or in confessional.
July 2004 — The archdiocese releases a list of 43 priests and former priests who were restricted from duties because of abuse allegations. It later adds Ronald Engel and Donald Musinkski to the list.
July 2006 — The archdiocese says it will sell the Cousins Center, its headquarters in St. Francis, to raise money as 10 lawsuits filed against it by clergy sex abuse victims move toward trials in California. No sale is made, however, before the Milwaukee-area real estate market collapses in 2009.
Septemer 2006 — The archdiocese agrees to pay more than $16 million to settle sexual abuse claims in California. The money goes to nine people abused by Widera and one abused by Becker.
July 2007 — The Wisconsin Supreme Court says sexual abuse victims can sue the Catholic church for fraud if they can prove church officials transferred priests with histories of abuse to new parishes and falsely claimed the priests were not a danger.
January 2008 — The Milwaukee archdiocese releases 800 pages of documents on Becker as part of a $16.65 million settlement of lawsuits filed in California; the records show the archdiocese received at least nine credible reports of abuse involving children and a 1984 psychological report described Becker as a pedophile in denial.
June 2008 — Weakland is deposed by Anderson regarding priests MacArthur, Widera and Becker; in a portion of the deposition released later, the former archbishop admits returning sexually abusive priests to active ministry without telling parishioners because he knew they wouldn't be accepted otherwise.
February 2009 — Pope Benedict XVI names Dolan as archbishop of New York.
May 2009 — Weakland tells The Associated Press that his upcoming memoir will describe his struggles with being gay and his failures to stop sexually abusive priests. He says, "I try to deal with this, I hope in an honest way, admitting my weaknesses in not being able to see this earlier, but at the same time doing what I could confront it."
November 2009 — Pope Benedict XVI names Bishop Jerome Listecki, of the Diocese of La Crosse in western Wisconsin, as Milwaukee's new archbishop.
January 2011 — The archdiocese says it will file for bankruptcy protection because pending sexual-abuse lawsuits could leave it with debts it couldn't pay. It is the eighth diocese in the U.S. to seek bankruptcy protection since the clergy abuse scandal erupted in 2002.
January 2012 — Dolan is named a cardinal.
February 2013 — Dolan gives a deposition to Anderson before flying to Rome to help choose a new pope.
April 2013 — The archdiocese announces it will release priests' personnel files and other documents to help resolve its bankruptcy case; it has already paid more than $30 million in settlements and court costs related to clergy abuse and is facing more than 570 claims in bankruptcy court.
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