VATICAN CITY (RNS) Contrary to widely reported charges, Pope Benedict XVI never suspended disciplinary procedures against a Milwaukee priest accused of molesting 200 deaf children, according to the church official who supervised those proceedings from 1996 to 1998.

The Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who is accused of molesting as many as 200 deaf boys between 1950 and 1974, “was still the defendant in a church criminal trial” when he died in 1998, the Rev. Thomas Brundage wrote in the Monday (March 29) online edition of the Catholic Anchor, a church newspaper in Anchorage, Alaska.

Victims of sex abuse have criticized Benedict, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, for his presumed role in the decision to halt proceedings against Murphy, months after the accused had petitioned Ratzinger for clemency shortly before his death.

Brundage, who served as chief judge of the church court of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee from 1995 to 2003, did not dispute the official account of a 1998 Vatican meeting in which Wisconsin church authorities were instructed to end judicial proceedings against Murphy.

The instruction came from then-Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, now a cardinal and Vatican Secretary of State, the Catholic Church’s No. 2 official, who was then the top deputy to Ratzinger at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

But Brundage wrote that he had not been told to halt the trial before Murphy’s death, and would have appealed such an order “to the supreme court of the church, or Pope John Paul II if necessary.”

Brundage also rejected accusations the future pope had acted improperly. “I have no reason to believe that (Benedict) was involved at all,” Brundage wrote. “Placing this matter at his doorstep is a huge leap of logic and information.”