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	Church Hits Back over BBC Claims Sydney Morning Herald [United Kingdom] October 3, 2006 http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/church-hits-back-over-bbc-claims/2006/10/02/1159641265798.html London: Catholic bishops in England and Wales have launched a retaliatory strike against BBC TV's Panorama series, saying a program highlighting the cover-up of alleged child sexual abuse by priests is unwarranted and misleading. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, will write to the broadcaster's director-general, Mark Thompson, a practising Catholic, to complain about the program, Sex Crimes and the Vatican. The program said it had unearthed Vatican documents aimed at preventing the proper examination of claims of child abuse and accused Pope Benedict XVI of shielding priests from investigation in his previous role as enforcer of church doctrinal orthodoxy. Archbishop Vincent Nichols, of Birmingham, said the BBC should be ashamed of the standard of its journalism: "Viewers will recognise only too well the sensational tactics and misleading editing of the program, which uses old footage and undated interviews. They will know that aspects of the program amount to a deeply prejudiced attack on a revered world religious leader." The program featured a 1962 statement called Crimen Sollicitationis, concerned with priestly abuse of secrets told during confessions, and a 2001 paper clarifying church law. Archbishop Nichols, who is chairman of the English church's child protection office, said on Sunday that the earlier document was not concerned with sex abuse and that the second was neither a means of covering up accusations nor of hindering police. "[The program] is false because it misrepresents [the] documents and uses them quite misleadingly in order to connect the horrors of child abuse to the person of the Pope," he said. A BBC spokeswoman said: "The protection of children is clearly an issue of the strongest public interest. The BBC stands by tonight's Panorama program."
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