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	Vatican Backs UK Bishops' Attack on BBC Documentary Gulf Times [Vatican] October 3, 2006 http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=110861&version=1&template_id=39&parent_id=21 Vatican City: The Vatican yesterday threw its full support behind British bishops who attacked a BBC documentary alleging a cover-up of child sexual abuse under a system Pope Benedict enforced in his previous job. Roman Catholic bishops from England and Wales condemned the documentary broadcast on Sunday as "false and misleading". The Vatican said it would have no comment of its own for the time being but said it fully endorsed a sternly worded statement by Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham written on behalf of the British bishops. Nichols, chair of the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults, said the BBC should be "ashamed of the standard of the journalism used to create this unwarranted attack on Pope Benedict XVI". Separately, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, archbishop of Westminster, sent a letter to Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, saying the accusations against the Pope were "malicious and untrue". He asked "if within the BBC there is a persistent bias against the Catholic Church". The BBC defended the documentary, made by the flagship current affairs programme 'Panorama', which examined what it described as a secret document written in 1962 that set out a procedure for dealing with child sex abuse within the Church. The document, called 'Crimen Sollicitationis', imposes an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing with the allegation and any witness. Breaking that oath would result in excommunication, the BBC said. "The procedure was intended to protect a priest's reputation until the Church had investigated, but in practice it can offer a blueprint for cover-up," the documentary said. "The man in charge of enforcing it for 20 years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man made Pope last year," reporter Colm O'Gorman said in the programme 'Sex Crimes and the Vatican'. Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department that enforces doctrine, from 1981 until his election as Pope in April 2005. Bishop Nichols' said the original document was concerned not directly with child abuse but with the abuse of the confessional by a priest to silence his victim. The document was revised in 2001 to deal more specifically with sex abuse cases but still remained secret. Bishop Nichols too rejected the attack on the Pope. "Since 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger ... took many steps to apply the law of the Church to allegations and offences of child abuse with absolute thoroughness and scruple," he said. His statement said the documentary highlighted cases of child abuse by priests, a crime he said the Catholic Church dealt with seriously, but also attacked the Pope. "This aspect of the programme is false and 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," he said. The document first surfaced publicly in 2003, when it was widely reported in the US media, and was used by lawyers for alleged victims of sexual abuse by priests in law suits against some American dioceses. The BBC said in a statement: "The protection of children is clearly an issue of the strongest public interest. The BBC stands by the 'Panorama' programme, and invites viewers to make up their own minds."
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