Benedict XVI's endlessly recurring
'Ninth Station' of the Cross
When this news first came online yesterday from Irish media, I decided against posting it: The headline was identical to the AP sotry today - 'Vatican told Irisn bishops not to report abuse', so I immediately checked the body of the report to find out when this warning was given and by whom.
The date was 1997, and the source of the story was identified as a yet-unpublished part of the Murphy Report, but there was no indication who in 'the Vatican' gave the warning and under what circumstances. Lacking these pertinent facts, I decided not to post until there was a clearer news report. Today's news reports are now explicit, and I have indicated the relevant data in the otherwise misleading headline.
How conveniently 'nifty and pat' that the MSM have found a new reason to revive the 'sex abuse scandal' in 2011, right on the heels of the announcement of John Paul II's beatification! A fresh opportunity for detractors to tar not just the Church and Benedict XVI all over, but the soon-to-be Blessed John Paul II as well.
(In 1997) the Vatican (Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland)
warned Irish bishops not to report abuse to the police
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
DUBLIN, January 18 (AP) – A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure that victims groups described as "the smoking gun" needed to show that the Vatican enforced a worldwide culture of cover-up.
The letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican's rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland's first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits.
The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that the Church in Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police.
It instead emphasizes the Church's right to handle all child-abuse allegations, and determine punishments in-house rather than hand that power to civil authorities.
Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature."
Storero wrote that canon law — which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the Church — "must be meticulously followed."
He warned that any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the "highly embarrassing" position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome.
Catholic officials in Ireland and the Vatican declined AP requests to comment on the letter, which RTE said it received from an Irish bishop.
Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter should demonstrate, once and for all, that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them.
"The letter is of huge international significance, because it shows that the Vatican's intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities. And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere," said Colm O'Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International.
Joelle Casteix, a director of U.S. advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, described the letter as "the smoking gun we've been looking for."
Casteix said it was certain to be cited by victims' lawyers seeking to pin responsibility directly on the Vatican rather than local dioceses. She said investigators long have sought such a document showing Vatican pressure on a group of bishops "thwarting any kind of justice for victims."
"We now have evidence that the Vatican deliberately intervened to order bishops not to turn pedophile priests over to law enforcement," she said. "And for civil lawsuits, this letter shows what victims have been saying for dozens and dozens of years: What happened to them involved a concerted cover-up that went all the way to the top."
{????] To this day, the Vatican has not endorsed any of the Irish church's three major policy documents since 1996 on safeguarding children from clerical abuse.
Irish taxpayers, rather than the church, have paid most of the euro1.5 billion ($2 billion) to more than 14,000 abuse claimants dating back to the 1940s.
[????]
In his 2010 pastoral letter to Ireland's Catholics condemning pedophiles in the ranks, Pope Benedict XVI faulted bishops for failing to follow canon law and
offered no explicit endorsement of Irish child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state. Benedict was widely criticized in Ireland for failing to admit any Vatican role in covering up the truth.
O'Gorman — who was raped repeatedly by an Irish priest in the 1980s when he was an altar boy and was among the first victims to speak out in the mid-1990s — said evidence is mounting that some Irish bishops continued to follow the 1997 Vatican instructions and withheld reports of crimes against children as recently as 2008.
Two state-commissioned reports published in 2009 — into the Dublin Archdiocese and workhouse-style Catholic institutions for children — unveiled decades of cover-ups of abuse involving tens of thousands of Irish children since the 1930s.
A third major state-ordered investigation into Catholic abuse cover-ups, concerning the southwest Irish diocese of Cloyne, is expected to be published within the next few months documenting the concealment of crimes as recently as 2008.
Irish Church leaders didn't begin telling police about suspected pedophile priests until the mid-1990s after the first major scandal — of a priest, Brendan Smyth, who had raped dozens of children while the church transferred him to parishes in Dublin, Belfast, Rhode Island and North Dakota — triggered the collapse of the entire Irish government. That national shock, in turn, inspired the first victims to begin suing the Church publicly.
In January 1996, Irish bishops published a groundbreaking policy document spelling out their newfound determination to report all suspected abuse cases to police.
But
in his January 1997 letter seen Tuesday by the AP, Storero told the bishops that a senior church panel in Rome, the Congregation for the Clergy, had decided that the Irish church's policy of "mandatory" reporting of abuse claims conflicted with canon law.
Storero emphasized in the letter that the Irish church's policy was not recognized by the Vatican and was "merely a study document."
Storero warned that bishops who followed the Irish child-protection policy and reported a priest's suspected crimes to police ran the risk of having their in-house punishments of the priest overturned by the Congregation for the Clergy.
The 2009 Dublin Archdiocese report found that this actually happened in the case of Tony Walsh, one of Dublin's most notorious pedophiles, who used his role as an Elvis impersonator in a popular "All Priests Show" to get closer to kids.
Walsh in 1993 was kicked out of the priesthood by a secret Dublin church court — but successfully appealed the punishment to a Vatican court, which
reinstated him to the priesthood in 1994.
[Storero's letter was in 1997, so it could not have applied to the Walsh case!]
He raped a boy in a pub restroom at his grandfather's funeral wake that year. Walsh since has received a series of prison sentences, most recently a 12-year term imposed last month. Investigators estimate he raped or molested more than 100 children.
Storero's 1997 letter, originally obtained by RTE religious affairs program "Would You Believe?", said the Congregation for the Clergy was pursuing "a global study" of sexual-abuse policies and would establish worldwide child-protection policies "at the appropriate time."
Today, the Vatican's child-protection policies remain in legal limbo. [An unfair statement, because the Vatican has - rightly - left it to the local bishops to devise their own child protection programs as they have in the US, the UK, Germany, and yes, even Ireland.]
The Vatican does advise bishops worldwide to report crimes to police — in a legally nonbinding lay guide on its Web site. This recourse is omitted from the official legal advice provided by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and updated last summer. That powerful policymaking body continues to stress the secrecy of canon law. [As well it should - in much the same way that civil law protects the reputation of the accused and presumes their innocence before they have been tried in court. Why should priests be exmept from presumption of innocence, when even terrorists who kill people in plain sight of dozens of witnesses and recorded on video surveillance continue to be 'presumed innocent' till they are tried and found guilty?]
The central message of Storero's letter was reported secondhand in the 2009 Dublin Archdiocese report. The letter itself, marked "strictly confidential," has never been published before.
My reaction, yesterday as today, is that the timing of this disclosure cannot have been simply coincidental to the news of John Paul II's beatification. Especially now that it turns out the vaunted 'smoking gun' letter came from the Nuncio to Ireland at the time. By definition, the Nuncio is the Pope's personal ambassador to the country of assignment, but functionally, he is directly under the Secretariat of State.
Predisposed detractors of the Church - and of John paul II's beatification, in particular - will immediately rush to judgment and point to it as 'evidence' that the late Pope was, at the very least, cavalier in his attitude towards sex abuses by priests.
Of course, the bare facts - as disclosed so far in a unilateral context - raise obvious questions: Would a Nuncio write such a letter without the express knowledge of the Pope, or would he do it simply on instruction from his immediate boss, the Secretary of State, who in 1997 was Cardinal Angelo Sodano? In turn, would Cardinal Sodano take such matters into his hands unilaterally - perhaps with the assent or knowledge of the then prefects of teh Congregations for Bishops and for the Clergy - without running it through John Paul II?
And would Cardinal Ratzinger, who, in 1997, had no direct involvement with sex offenses by priests, have necessarily known that Storero had written such a letter?
Unfortunately for all of us, Storero is gone. Will Cardinal Sodano take this opportunity to speak out now about his role in all this - including the murky circumstances concerning his reported involvement in the handling of the two Austrian bishops accused of sexual abuse and of the Maciel case?
The collateral consideration in all this is that Sodano and Cardinal Leonardo Sandri (now prefect for Oriental Churches), who was his deputy Secretary of State from 2000-2005, both explicitly refused to testify about John Paul II to the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood on the ground that they felt it was much too soon to consider his cause for beatification! Potentially, that could be damaging, especially in the eyes of conspiracy theorists.
The NYT at least
presents the Vatican side
P.S.
The New York Times, in an article written by -who else?, the infamous Laurie Goodstein -
www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/world/europe/19vatican.html?_r=3&src=twt&twt...
pretty much follows the 'Gotcha!' approach and tone of the AP story, and cites the usual bitter anti-Church critics, but it does include the following statements from the Vatican side, which is the right and fair thing to do:
Jeffrey S. Lena, a lawyer for the Vatican, said in a statement that the letter “has been deeply misunderstood.”
He said that its primary purpose was to ensure that bishops used proper canonical procedures to discipline their priests so that the punishments were not overturned on technical grounds.
He said the letter was also intended to question the validity of the Irish bishops’ policies, because they were issued merely as a “study document.”
Mr. Lena added, “In stark contrast to news reports, the letter nowhere instructed Irish bishops to disregard civil law reporting requirements.” [And as pointed out in many previous reports on this issue, such requirements were not enacted in Ireland until recently, I think las late as 2008 or 2009.]
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that the letter represented an approach to sexual abuse cases shaped by a particular Vatican office, the Congregation for the Clergy, before 2001.
That year, Pope John Paul II charged the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then led by the future Pope Benedict, with handling such cases.
“It refers to a situation that we’ve now moved beyond,” Father Lombardi said. “That approach has been surpassed, including its ideas about collaborating with civil authorities.”
He played down the idea that the letter was a smoking gun. “It’s not new,” he said. “They’ve known about it in Ireland for some time."
[Obviously, the bishops knew about it, since it was submitted to the Murphy Commission! They could just as well not have submitted it if they had any intent to deceive!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/01/2011 01:50]