BishopAccountability.org
	Child Abuse Tracks Go Back to the Vatican By Michael Harris London Free Press January 22, 2011 http://www.lfpress.com/comment/2011/01/21/16980426.html This week, the tracks of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic clergy led back to the Vatican. Thanks to Irish broadcaster RTE, a part of the story never quite nailed down before has finally been published. A 1997 letter signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero advised Ireland's bishops against "mandatory" reporting of sex abuse cases to civil authorities. He wrote that canon law "must be meticulously followed" which meant not referring sex abuse cases to police. Storero was a powerful figure. At the time he wrote the letter, he was Pope John Paul II's ecumenical diplomat to Ireland. His written words came with a warning: those bishops who tried to assist in dealing with sex abuse cases outside canonical law risked the "highly embarrassing" prospect of having their actions overturned on appeal to Rome. When I was writing Unholy Orders about clerical sex abuse in Newfoundland, I came away with many unpleasant memories. But perhaps the most distressing was the institutional Pontius Pilate pulled by the church's most senior clergy. They lurched from the absurd proposition that the story didn't involve them because the Irish Christian Brothers, the perpetrators of sex crimes at Mount Cashel, didn't work for the Vatican, to the equally self-serving notion that church leaders just didn't realize what was going on. They had, in fact, realized and for quite a long time. Back in 1954, a child was sexually abused at Mount Cashel by a worker there. The archbishop of St. John's was immediately notified. So how could they not have known about the serial sexual and physical abuse at Mount Cashel in 1975 - particularly when the case was the subject of a detailed and damning police investigation at the time. Then archbishop of St. John's, Alphonus Penney, issued vague regrets through a spokesperson and then hired a high-powered advertising agency to deal with the fallout from a number of inquires into Mount Cashel called in the late '80s, including one initiated by Penney himself. It's key to note the language used by his spokesperson, Rev. Kevin Molloy, because it contains the seed of the position that has come back to haunt the Vatican. "Looking back on it now, obviously it should have been approached differently, but the point is that the advice at the time was to approach this as a legal issue and we apologize for that. We feel sorry that this was the stand taken." The legal advice was blunt: if you admit knowledge of the sex abuse cases, you accept financial liability. With so many children involved, that could prove very costly. None of the advice-givers apparently gave much thought to the fact that the Church is not Microsoft or Procter and Gamble. The morality business is different from software and toothpaste. And another thing: getting advice is one thing, taking it, an entirely different matter. Victims in Canada and abroad have always said that there was a cover-up of their cases from top to bottom in the Church. Now the Vatican will have to explain why years after Molloy's apology, the Vatican was still treating child abuse by parsing the finer points of canonical law to eschew scandal. I know. Storero was just expressing his own opinion, not papal policy. Of course. Contact: mharris@cfra.com
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.