ROME
Vaticano/Anticlericale.net
Rome, August 14, 2005 – The scandal exploded only during the 2003 summer when the US daily Worcester Telegram & Gazette obtained a copy of a document that for 40 years had been kept as “strictly confidential” in the secret archives of the Holy See that describes the story of a lawyer from Boston, Carmen Durso, who filed a complain with the Prosecutor Michel J. Sullivan containing a copy of the 1962 Instruction “Crimen Sollicitationis” and asking to verify if, within the federal jurisdiction, would have been possible to prosecute the Vatican hierarchies that he claimed were guilty of deliberately covering from the US authorities the sexual abuses committed by members of the clergy.
At the same time, another letter signed by Daniel Shea, a lawyer and former seminarist who discovered the 1962 document and gave a copy of it to the Boston daily and to Mr. Durso, reached the desk of the Prosecutor. The document, said Shea in the letter, is quoted as still applicable in a note of the epistle "De Delictis Gravioribus" of 18 May 2001 that the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger, delivered to the bishops and other ordained and members of the ecclesiastic hierarchy.
This episode was brought to the attention of the international public opinion by the US Television CBSand the Vatican hierarchies replied by stating that the norms contained in the 1962 document could not be anymore considered as binding after the entry into force of the 1983 reform of the Codice di Diritto Canonico, despite the fact that the Ratzinger letter did not support this; in fact, the current Pope Benedict XVI in such letter not only recalled the instruction “Crimen Sollicitationis”, but concerning the “crimes under the jurisdiction of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” states that “In the Tribunals set up upon the ordained or the members of the Catholic hierarchies only priests can validly carry out the function of judge, justice promoter, notary and counsel for the defence” and it restates that “the trials of this kind are the subject of papal secret”.
Over the last two years the US judiciary has continued the investigations and since January 2005, a prosecution against Joseph Ratzinger is taking place at the District Court of Harris County (Texas).