BishopAccountability.org
	Irish Child Abuse Report Attacks Vatican and Powerful Bishop By Henry Mcdonald Sydney Morning Herald July 14, 2011 http://www.smh.com.au/world/irish-child-abuse-report-attacks-vatican-and-powerful-bishop-20110714-1hfzy.html A DEVASTATING report into clerical child abuse in an Irish Catholic diocese has accused the Vatican of being ''entirely unhelpful'' in dealing with allegations of sexual exploitation. It singled out an Irish bishop, who was the confidant of three popes, for deliberately misleading authorities in the Republic of Ireland about the church's internal inquiries into children's claims that priests were abusing them. The investigation into the diocese of Cloyne, which includes County Cork, said Bishop John Magee had little interest in the way sex abuse cases were handled until 2008, when the scandal became international news. Bishop Magee was an extremely powerful figure, not only in the Irish church, but also in Rome. He was the first official on the scene when John Paul I was found dead in his quarters. The Commission of Investigation report also said Rome's decision to brand a document on child sexual abuse as unofficial allowed individual bishops ''the freedom to ignore'' strict guidelines on protecting children. The 431-page report examined allegations made against 19 priests in the diocese between 1996 and 2000. The report follows other damning reports in other dioceses that found a culture of cover-ups and denial in the church hierarchy. In stinging criticism of Bishop Magee, who resigned in March 2010, the report said: ''It is a remarkable fact that Bishop Magee took little or no active interest in the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008, 12 years after the framework document was adopted. Bishop Magee was the head of the diocese and cannot avoid his responsibility by blaming subordinates who he wholly failed to supervise,'' it said. The inquiry said the fact that some child sexual abuse allegations were not reported to police was the diocese's ''greatest failure''. There were 15 cases between 1996 and 2005 which should have been reported. Yet police were not told about nine cases. The most serious lapse was the failure to report the two cases in which the alleged victims were minors. Andrew Madden, a victim of sexual abuse while an altar boy in the Dublin archdiocese, said the report proved that ''with occasional exceptions, Catholic bishops cannot be trusted with allegations of child sexual abuse''. ? Germany's Catholic Church said it would open its archives to independent researchers in a bid to shed light on all aspects of cases of sexual abuse by priests. ''We want to uncover the truth which might still lie as yet undiscovered in the archives,'' Stephan Ackermann, the bishop of Trier, said in a statement. Bishop Ackermann said the Church would open its complete archives, which date back to 1945, from nine of its dioceses. It would also release a cross-section of documents from the other 18 dioceses, dating back to 2000, to researchers. ''It's not just a question of enabling researchers to compile statistics and numbers, but to examine the causes with the help of independent experts so as to better understand how we got into this monstrous sexual abuse by priests and church workers,'' he said.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.