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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Statement on the “Response of the
Holy See to the Government of Ireland Regarding the Report of the
Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne”
Pope Benedict XVI’s “response”
to the Cloyne report is wholly inadequate,
but the mere fact of the response indicates the gravity of the Vatican’s
situation. The Vatican’s involvement in child abuse cases
in Ireland and elsewhere is finally a matter of public record, and
Pope Benedict has been forced to respond. That is progress.
But Pope Benedict’s response shows that the Vatican is still
in denial. It still wants people to believe that civil law and the
Vatican’s internal policies are parallel legal systems. Benedict
cannot grasp the fact that the Vatican is finally being named in
civil lawsuits. It has been compelled to produce documents for the
first time. It can no longer depend on “cooperation”
with politicians to shield it from scrutiny. That is the significance
of Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s speech and the Dáil
vote, as Benedict well knows. Even in Ireland, where church-state
ties are institutionalized and where church attendance was high
until very recently, the Vatican no longer receives special treatment:
Pope Benedict’s “response” to the situation in
Cloyne is self-aggrandizing and unresponsive. After a single pro
forma paragraph stating that “the Holy See is sorry and ashamed”
for the “terrible sufferings” of abuse victims and their
families, Benedict devotes the rest of his 25-page response to evading
responsibility for the disaster in Cloyne. The core of the crisis
that the Vatican now faces in Ireland is a letter
dated January 31, 1997, that then-Vatican ambassador to Ireland,
Archbishop Luciano Storero, wrote to all the Irish bishops, including
John Magee, S.P.S., Bishop of Cloyne, calling into question the
1996 Framework of the Irish bishops on
child sexual abuse.
Archbishop
Diarmuid Martin’s response to the response, which mistakenly
identifies Castrillón Hoyos as the author of the Storero
letter, is a subtle attempt to find common ground within the current
Irish debate. But Martin understates the importance of the Storero
letter, especially to a bishop like Magee, who is a Vatican creature.
The Murphy
and Cloyne
reports show that Irish canon lawyers and diocesan officials were
hostile to the Framework and all attempts at reform. Clearly Storero’s
letter gave aid and comfort to such people.
Pope Benedict attempts to explain away the letter and its significance,
and in the process misrepresents the Cloyne report’s own assessment
of the letter’s importance. At the end of the day, the fact
remains that the Storero letter encouraged Bishop Magee, a former
papal secretary, and all his fellow bishops, to ignore the Framework
and neglect its implementation. The Cloyne report provides ample
and painful evidence of that neglect.
As the Vatican often does, it leavened its statement with moments
of inadvertent humor. For example, Pope Benedict offered Cardinal
Darío Castrillón Hoyos as an example of the Vatican’s
commitment to civil law (page 12). This is the
same Castrillón Hoyos who praised a French bishop for refusing
to turn over a sex-offending priest to the civil authorities
in 2001: “I commend you for not denouncing a priest to the
civil administration. You have done well.”
Pope Benedict’s response shows that he is still bewitched
by the church’s self-descriptions and policies and procedures,
still pretending that the church’s reactive and belated statements
break new policy ground, and still unwilling to admit that the structures
and policies that emanate from Rome have caused the rape of children,
in Cloyne and dioceses worldwide.
Terence McKiernan
President
BishopAccountability.org
508-479-9304 cell
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