Vatican warned Irish bishops not to report abuse

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DUBLIN (AP) — A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure with the potential to fuel more lawsuits worldwide against the Vatican, which has long denied any involvement in cover-ups.

The letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican's rejection of an Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests.

The letter's message undermines persistent Vatican claims that the church never instructed bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church's right to handle all child-abuse allegations, and determine punishments, in house rather than hand that power to civil authorities.

Catholic officials in Ireland declined AP requests on the letter, which RTE said it received from an Irish bishop.

Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter should demonstrate, once and for all, that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them. A key argument employed by the Vatican in defending dozens of lawsuits over clerical sex abuse in the United States is that it had no role in ordering local church authorities to suppress evidence of crimes.

"The letter is of huge international significance, because it shows that the Vatican's intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities. And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere," said Colm O'Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International.

To this day, the Vatican has yet to endorse any of the Irish church's three major policy documents since 1996 on reporting suspected child abuse to civil authorities. In his 2010 pastoral letter to the Irish people condemning pedophiles in the ranks, Pope Benedict XVI faulted Ireland's bishops for failing to follow canon law and offered no explicit endorsement of Irish child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state.

O'Gorman — who was raped repeatedly by an Irish priest when he was an altar boy and was among the first victims to speak out in the mid-1990s — said evidence is mounting that some Irish bishops continued to follow the 1997 Vatican instructions and withheld reports of crimes against children as recently as 2008.

A third major state-ordered investigation into Catholic abuse cover-ups, concerning the southwest Irish diocese of Cloyne, is expected to be published within the next few months.

Two state-commissioned reports published in 2009 — into the Dublin Archdiocese and workhouse-style Catholic institutions for children — unveiled decades of cover-ups of abuse involving tens of thousands of children since the 1930s.

Irish church leaders didn't begin telling police about suspected pedophile priests until the mid-1990s. In January 1996, Irish bishops published a groundbreaking policy document spelling out their newfound determination to report all suspected abuse cases to police.

But in the January 1997 letter seen Tuesday by the AP, the Vatican's diplomat in Ireland at the time, Archbishop Luciano Storero, told the bishops that a senior church panel in Rome, the Congregation for the Clergy, had decided that the Irish church's year-old policy of "mandatory" reporting of abuse claims conflicted with canon law.

Storero emphasized in the letter that the Irish church's policy was not recognized by the Vatican and was "merely a study document." He said canon law — which required abuse allegations to be handled within the church — "must be meticulously followed."

Without elaborating Storero, who died in 2000, wrote that mandatory reporting of child-abuse claims to police "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and a canonical nature."

He warned that bishops who followed the Irish child-protection policy and reported a priest's suspected crimes to police ran the risk of having their in-house punishments of the priest overturned by the Congregation for the Clergy.

The letter, originally obtained by RTE religious affairs program "Would You Believe?", said the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome was pursuing "a global study" of sexual-abuse policies and would establish worldwide child-protection policies "at the appropriate time."

The Vatican's child-protection policies today remain in legal limbo. It currently advises bishops worldwide to report crimes to police only in a legally non-binding lay guide, but it does not mention this in the official legal document provided by another powerful church body, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which continues to stress the secrecy of canon law.

The central message of Storero's letter was reported second-hand by two priests as part of Ireland's mammoth investigation into the 1975-2004 cover-up of hundreds of child-abuse cases in the Dublin Archdiocese. The letter itself, marked "strictly confidential," has never been published before.

And it goes on. I'd like to see the letter itself.

This goes back to Vatican II when the corrupt Italian Catholic Pope then - using Latin - threatened to fire all Italian Catholic cardinals and bishops around the world who reported Italian Catholic clergy child crimes to the secular police. What kind of job does a fired Cardinal or bishop get when they are excommunicated by the corrupt, fascist, Mafia Vatican? Actually it goes back way prior to Vatican II. What is so awful (my view) is the (phony) Bush, Jr. Texas Republican White House closed down Washington, D.C. when the last corrupt Italian Pope died so Bush, Jr. could go to the funeral in Rome. Bush, Jr. even ordered the USA flag to be lowered to half-mast thereby signaling that pedofile assisting, criminal Popes of Rome were viewed as good friends of the Bush, Jr./Rush Limbaugh Republican Party White House (so to speak). Nonsense. Bush, Jr. should have been asked to resign for going to the criminal Pope's funeral and replaced by VP Richard Cheney years ago. The Vatican stinks. The Bush, Jr. White House stinks. The World Court of Europe should have asked the criminal Pope to step aside, stand trial, and put the corrupt criminal Pope of Italy in jail for life. Where's international justice involving the criminal Pope of Italy? There is none - year 2011.

Oh, him. Yeah, he's being declared Blessed on May 1st. Which is very cool.

I don't for a moment think that John Paul II ever condoned a single act of child abuse. He, and Vatican officials under his authority, did make terrible mistakes in how those crimes were handled. And we see the results.

Uh considering we're talking about a man that had Parkinson's Disease, I find it highly unlikely that John Paul II wrote the letter. My grandfather had Parkinson's Disease and he couldn't write because he shook so badly, anything the Pope would have tried to write or type for that matter would be either illegible or jibberish.

Most likely it was some Cardinal acting without John Paul II's knowledge.

Yeah, I guess - I'm no Vatican expert, just another lay Catholic sickened by scandal after scandal. Much as I loved JPII, and don't think he deliberately shielded child abusers, I do think he made significant mistakes (trusting Maciel against his accusers being a huge one). Again, though, I'd like to see the letter itself; not the media analysis of it.

Link to a scanned copy of the Vatican letter (small! print): http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... le1874546/

Link to the Irish Bishops' document: http://www.catholicbishops.ie/images/do ... mework.pdf

The Irish document emphasizes early and often that any action taken is to be in accord with canon law. The Congregration for the Clergy, being a higher level of authority, is saying that some things in the document are against canon law. Nowhere does it say to conceal or not report cases of sexual abuse.

Around after the gun shot, John Paul got old and he didn't really set direction of much in the Vatican.

Ratzinger was actually the man behind the man during John Paul's last days. John Paul was more of an ambassador and public image. Of course, it does not mean he had not wronged by omission for letting this happen. But it is 100% most likely Ratzinger was the intellectual author of this whole Vatican method to deal with pedophiles.

I do not really think the Vatican was trying to protect the pedophilles, after all, they have nothing to win from that, it is not like that the head of the church is behind a conspiracy to get children raped. I think they were just ret*d and paranoid. They thought that taking the justice and handling by themselves, they could make sure to eliminate the pedophiles' threat without harming the image of the Church. But they were naive, we were no longer in freaking century XVI , you cannot hide things like that anymore, and it was stupid. The irony in this is that all their moves were attempts to mantain a good PR image for the church, but since they had to indirectly protect the priests from the law in order to try to hide the scandal, it really, really destroyed their PR image...

I think all the back-slash and the bad image is well-deserved, and I hope soon a new pope decides to send the whole deal to s**t and establishes a zero tolerance method , and they should also create rules for priests similar to the boy scouts of America's rules. Something as simple as making sure no member of the church is ever able to be alone with children without another adult around would do wonders not only to protect children but also to protect priests from possible smear, because, we have to accept, some of the cases are probably fabricated by greedy people that want money... and priests need to be protected by rules like that so that this sort of accusation is harder to make unless it happened.

@Waltur -

Sorry. I got bogged down in sections 3 and 4 of the Irish document, which read to me as a logistical nightmare of in-house procedures and bureaucracy. As I read the Vatican letter, it was saying to be careful how cases are handled - "no mandatory reporting" is not the same as "no reporting", and I think sections 2.2.3 and 2.2.4 of the Irish document give a good picture of the concern. It's an extremely personal area, and there are victims who will not report or will wait longer to report if they do not have absolute privacy. Last year, after the Irish government seized all those documents from Church offices, there were victims who were furious at the breach of privacy. You have to protect the victims, all of them; and there's emotional protection to consider as well. (And yeah, spiritual protection. I didn't see much in the document about respecting the Sacrament of Confession; and while that might have been a given, the omission would be cause for worry.)

[edited to remove a tidy wrap-up of a disgustingly messy situation.]

I believe the Vatican is more interested in keeping up the sagging numbers of priests, than with punishing offenders, which might include expulsion from the priesthood. Even if that means protecting pedophiles.
Plus, pedophilia is the dirty little secret Rome tried kept swept under the carpet, as the allegedly holy state of chastity might be perceived as a contributing factor to the crime. Or at least that is the perception of many.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer