U.K. Catholics Dispute Cover-Up Report, CBS News [United Kingdom], October 2, 2006

U.K. Catholics Dispute Cover-Up Report

CBS News [United Kingdom]
October 2, 2006

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/02/world/main2054421.shtml

(CBS) The Catholic Church is hitting back after a British magazine news program claimed that, before he became pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI enforced a secret policy effectively covering up child sex abuse cases among priests.

CBS News reporter Vicki Barker in London reports that the BBC claimed that then-Cardinal Ratzinger, in his capacity as guardian of Church doctrine, backed and enforced a document that imposes an oath of silence on abusing priests and their child victims — on pain of excommunication.

Adopted in its original form in 1962, the document first came under public scrutiny during investigations of sex abuse cover-ups in the Church during the last decade.

Pope Benedict XVI addressing the faithful the Vatican, Sept. 25, 2006.
Photo by AP / Plinio Lepri

Quote

"It is false because it misrepresents two Vatican documents and uses them quite misleadingly in order to connect the horrors of child abuse to the person of the Pope."

Archbishop of Birmingham Vincent Nichols

But the BBC also showed what it claimed was a 2001 update of the original 1962 text. The Vatican says it's still studying a transcript of the show.

Responding to the weekend program, the Archbishop of Birmingham, told the BBC that their work had been "entirely misleading."

"It is false because it misrepresents two Vatican documents and uses them quite misleadingly in order to connect the horrors of child abuse to the person of the Pope," Archbishop Vincent Nichols told the BBC in a report published Monday.

The Church maintains that the document does not refer explicitly to sex abuse cases at all, but "with the misuse of the confessional, "according to the BBC.

A former Catholic Church attorney recruited by the BBC to decipher the cryptic document, Father Tom Doyle, made the allegation that it was an "explicit written policy to cover up cases of child abuse."

Doyle was fired from his position at the Vatican after he criticized the Church's handling of the sex abuse scandal, according to the BBC.

Refusing to back away from the allegations made by the show, a BBC spokeswoman said the government-funded network would treat a letter of protest from Catholic Church leaders in Britain as it did all other letters of complaint.

She added, "the protection of children is clearly an issue of the strongest public interest."