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	British Documentary Alleges Pope Linked to The News [United Kingdom] October 2, 2006 http://www.thenews.com.pk/update_detail.asp?id=10513 London: A British documentary aired Sunday claimed that Pope Benedict XVI was implicated in the systematic cover-up of child sex abuse allegations against Catholic priests. Before becoming head of the church, the then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger enforced church doctrinal orthodoxy, including a "secret Vatican decree which seemed to shelter the perpetrators and silence the victims of abuse", a programme said. This was the 1962 document Crimen Sollicitationis, which told top churchmen how to deal with priests who "solicit or provoke the penitent toward impure and obscene matters", according to a translation from Latin on a British news channel's website. It imposed an oath of secrecy on victims, witnesses and those probing abuse claims and said that anyone breaking this would be excommunicated, it said. Father Tom Doyle, a canon solicitor reportedly sacked by the Vatican after criticising its handling of child abuse claims, said that Crimen was "an explicit written policy to cover up cases of child sexual abuse by the clergy, to punish those who would call attention to these crimes by the churchmen." But the programme's claims have provoked a furious response from the Catholic Church in Britain.
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