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	Letter Said Irish Abuse Should Be Handled Internally Rather Than Reported The Cathnews January 19, 2011 http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=24763 A newly-revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police, and to defer to requirements that abuse allegations and punishments must be handled within the church, said an AP report on Google News. 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, according to the report. It undermines persistent Vatican claims that the church in Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. 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 reportedly declined AP requests to comment on the letter, which RTE said it received from an Irish bishop. "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 US advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, described the letter as "the smoking gun", which could be cited by victims' lawyers seeking to pin responsibility directly on the Vatican rather than local dioceses.
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