Vatican Opposed Mandatory Reporting of Abuse, by Ed Brayton, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, January 20, 2011

Vatican Opposed Mandatory Reporting of Abuse

By Ed Brayton
Dispatches from the Culture Wars
January 20, 2011

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2011/01/vatican_opposed_mandatory_repo.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink

Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)

The New York Times publishes the text of a letter from the Vatican to their leadership in Ireland, who had passed a policy of mandatory reporting of sexual abuse by priests to the police. Unsurprisingly, the Vatican didn't like that policy.

By 1996, an advisory committee of Irish bishops had drawn up a new policy that included "mandatory reporting" of suspected abusers to civil authorities. The letter, signed by Archbishop Luciano Storero, then the Vatican's apostolic nuncio -- or chief representative -- in Ireland, told the Irish bishops that the Vatican had reservations about mandatory reporting for both "moral and canonical" reasons. Archbishop Storero died in 2000.

This is yet another smoking gun showing that the Vatican long opposed mandatory reporting of sexual abuse by priests. We know that the current pope wrote a letter in 2001 telling bishops that they were to keep all such complaints within the church hierarchy only and not report them to the police.

And we know that in the specific case of a priest in California, the current pope wrote a letter opposing the defrocking of a priest even after he was convicted of lewd conduct with a minor and even after his local diocese had concluded that he must be removed from the church.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: The Catholic Church should be held to exactly the same standards that any teacher, police officer or doctor is held to. They are legally required to report cases of abuse to the police. And if priests and bishops fail to do so, they should be jailed as accessories after the fact.