By Steven Carroll
Irish Times
July 14, 2011
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0714/breaking32.html?via=rel
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| 'New York Times' coverage of the Cloyne report publication |
There was limited international coverage of the publication of the Cloyne report, with few British newspapers reporting on its publication.
US newspapers paid more attention to the subject with a number of titles choosing to focus on how the Vatican handled reports of sexual abuse in the diocese.
The Washington Post reports a "New report on Catholic Church cover-ups of child abuse in Ireland blames bishop, Vatican".
It says that the Cloyne report "detailed the church's suppression of information on 19 suspected child-abusing priests". It reports Bishop John Magee ignored Irish church rules requiring all suspected molestation cases to be reported to police and that the Vatican encouraged this concealment.
The Boston Globe reports on how an Irish diocese "ignored rules on reporting abuse".
"The new developments showed the tensions between civil and ecclesiastical justice in a crisis that has shaken the church's moral authority worldwide," it said.
It says the Cloyne report shed light on "a complex tug of war between the Irish church and the Vatican over how to handle abuse, with a fine line between confusion and obstruction".
Under the headline "Irish Report Finds Abuse Persisting in Catholic Church" the New York Times says the Catholic Church here was covering up child sexual abuse cases as recently as two years ago.
It says that most damaging aspect of the report was that the Congregation for the Clergy, an arm of the Vatican that oversees the priesthood, had not recognised the Irish Bishops Conference 1996 guidelines on child protection.
The New York Times also highlights how the German Catholic bishops took new steps yesterday to bring previously unreported abuse to light. They are to allow outside investigators to look for abuse cases in diocesan personnel records dating back in some cases all the way to 1945, though there were indications that some crucial records may have already been destroyed.
In the UK, the Guardian , under the headline "Irish report on child sex abuse berates Vatican", focuses more on Bishop Magee who is described as "an extremely powerful figure not only in the Irish church but also in Rome".
The Guardian said Bishop Magee was a close confidant of three popes but had now been "singled out for deliberately misleading authorities about the church's internal inquiries into claims that priests were abusing children".
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