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	British Cardinal Condemns BBC for Accusing Pope of Covering up Abuse, By Simon Caldwell Catholic Online [United Kingdom] October 2, 2006 http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=21475 London (CNS) – The president of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales condemned the British Broadcasting Corp. for a documentary which accused Pope Benedict XVI of covering up priest sex abuse against children. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of Westminster made a formal complaint to the director-general of the BBC about the Oct. 1 documentary. The documentary claimed to reveal how the pope issued a "secret Vatican edict" instructing bishops to put the interests of the church before the safety of children. In an Oct. 2 letter to Mark Thompson, the director-general and a Catholic, Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor expressed the "enormous distress and alarm of the Catholic community" at the decision made by the publicly funded broadcaster to show the documentary called "Sex Crimes and the Vatican." The documentary said that in 2001 Pope Benedict, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the head of the doctrinal congregation, issued an updated version of a 1962 Vatican document, titled "Crimen Sollicitationis" ("The Crime of Solicitation") which the documentary said laid down the rules for covering up sexual scandals. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said no one could deny the "devastating effects of child abuse in our society" and that it was "particularly shameful" when committed by a priest. However, he said, the BBC documentary "sets out to inflict grave damage on Pope Benedict." "The main focus of the program is to seek to connect Pope Benedict with (the) cover-up of child abuse in the Catholic Church," the cardinal said. "This is malicious and untrue and based on a false presentation of church documents." It was not the first time that church authorities have sought to discredit claims that the 1962 document was part of a scheme to cover up clergy sex abuse. In 2003, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' communications office said that the 1962 document "has no bearing on civil law. It does not forbid the civil reporting of civil crimes." It added that the document dealt with "ecclesiastical crimes and punishments found in church law." The 1962 document was superseded by the 1983 Code of Canon Law and 2001 norms for dealing with serious crimes involving the sacraments. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor criticized the journalistic standards of the BBC, saying he could not understand why the BBC did not contact the church for "assistance in seeking accurate information." "I must ask if within the BBC there is a persistent bias against the Catholic Church," he said. "There will be many, not only Catholics, who will wonder if the BBC is any longer willing to be truly objective in some of its presentations," the cardinal said. "What a pity if the respect in which the BBC is held worldwide were to be seriously undermined by the bias and lack of integrity shown in the decision to broadcast a program such as this." The cardinal's remarks came a day after Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham, England, criticized the documentary as an "unwarranted" and "deeply prejudiced attack on a revered world religious leader." Archbishop Nichols said that the film misrepresented two Vatican documents and "uses them quite misleadingly in order to connect the horrors of child abuse to the person of the pope." "The first document, issued in 1962, is not directly concerned with child abuse at all but with the misuse of the confessional," he said. "The second document clarified the law of the church, ensuring that the Vatican is informed of every case of child abuse and that each case is dealt with properly ... it is a measure of the seriousness with which the Vatican views these offenses." A spokesman for the BBC said that the corporation stood by the film. "The protection of children is clearly an issue of the strongest public interest," he said.
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