IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph
By Eamonn McCann
Friday, 23 March 2012
What emerges most starkly from the report by emissaries of the Holy See into child sex-abuse in Ireland is that there has been no change in the hierarchy of hypocrisy.
The report, released on Tuesday, was compiled from information gathered by seven separate teams of clerics sent by Benedict XVI to study and draw lessons from the Church’s handling of the scandal.
The source and scale of the operation had encouraged expectations that the exercise would go some way towards tracing the problem to its roots – towards the role not just of the Church in Ireland, but of the Holy See, the global governance of the Church.
But the document published at a press conference in Maynooth did the opposite. It is a sustained effort to exculpate the Holy See, while pronouncing on the inadequacies of Irish bishops and religious superiors.
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