Daily Mail
January 18, 2011
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1348298/Vatican-told-Irish-Catholic-bishops-cover-child-abuse-says-letter.html
A 1997 letter from the Vatican telling Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police has been uncovered.
The Vatican has long denied any involvement in cover-ups and the letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE, has the potential to fuel more lawsuits worldwide.
The letter documents the Vatican's rejection of an Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify paedophile priests.
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| Leader: The letter telling Irish Bishops to keep allegations of child abuse in-house was written under the papacy of John Paul II |
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| Author: The letter was written by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, while Pope Benedict XVI, right, has not endorsed Irish child-protection efforts | |
The letter's message undermines persistent Vatican claims that the church never instructed 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.
Catholic officials in Ireland had previously refused to release he letter, which RTE said it had received from an Irish bishop.
Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter should demonstrate, once and for all, that the protection of paedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them.
A key argument employed by the Vatican in defending dozens of lawsuits over clerical sex abuse in the United States is that it had no role in ordering local church authorities to suppress evidence of crimes.
'The letter is of huge international significance, because it shows that the Vatican's intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities,' said Colm O'Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International.
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| Huge significance: Colm O'Gorman of Amnesty says the 1997 letter telling Irish Bishops to cover up child abuse is an important piece of evidence |
'And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere.
To this day, the Vatican has yet to endorse any of the Irish church's three major policy documents since 1996 on reporting suspected child abuse to civil authorities.
In his 2010 pastoral letter to the Irish people condemning paedophiles in the ranks, Pope Benedict XVI faulted Ireland's bishops for failing to follow canon law and offered no explicit endorsement of Irish child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state.
O'Gorman - who was raped repeatedly by an Irish priest 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.
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.
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| Reticent: The Vatican is yet to endorse any of the Irish church's three major policies on reporting suspected child abuse |
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 children since the 1930s.
Irish church leaders didn't begin telling police about suspected paedophile priests until the mid-1990s.
In January 1996, Irish bishops published a groundbreaking policy document spelling out their new-found determination to report all suspected abuse cases to police.
But in the January 1997 letter, the Vatican's diplomat in Ireland at the time, Archbishop Luciano Storero, told the bishops that a senior church panel in Rome, the Congregation for the Clergy, had decided that the Irish church's year-old policy of 'mandatory' reporting of abuse claims conflicted with canon law.
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| Would You Believe? The letter was uncovered by Irish broadcasters RTE |
Storero emphasized in the letter that the Irish church's policy was not recognized by the Vatican and was 'merely a study document'.
He said canon law - which required abuse allegations to be handled within the church - 'must be meticulously followed'.
Without elaborating, Storero, who died in 2000, wrote that mandatory reporting of child-abuse claims to police 'gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and a canonical nature.'
He 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 letter, originally obtained by RTE religious affairs program Would You Believe?, said the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome was pursuing 'a global study' of sexual-abuse policies and would establish worldwide child-protection policies 'at the appropriate time'.
The Vatican's child-protection policies today remain in legal limbo.
It currently advises bishops worldwide to report crimes to police only in a legally non-binding lay guide, but it does not mention this in the official legal document provided by another powerful church body, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which continues to stress the secrecy of canon law.
The central message of Storero's letter was reported second-hand by two priests as part of Ireland's mammoth investigation into the 1975-2004 cover-up of hundreds of child-abuse cases in the Dublin Archdiocese.
The letter itself, marked 'strictly confidential,' has never been published before.
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