Pre-empted Sunday

I thought this news was already out, but perhaps it was just the suspicion of such a document that has been reported previously...

Irish broadcaster RTE has uncovered a 1997 letter from the Vatican discouraging Ireland's Catholic bishops from reporting on all suspected child-abuse cases to police.

[...]

Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland, the letter came a year after the Vatican's rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to assist police in identifying alleged pedophile priests with Ireland's first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits.

[...]

Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the disclosed document demonstrates that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but also ordered by them. Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the disclosed document demonstrates that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but also ordered by them.

[...]

Jeffrey Lena, the Vatican's US lawyer, said the letter did no such thing.

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Al Jazeera's Tania Paige reporting from London, said: "For the Vatican's part, they say the letter was written a long time ago and that the document was not a policy but a study draft.

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In a 2010 pastoral letter to Ireland's Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI faulted bishops for failing to follow canon law and offered no explicit endorsement of Irish child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state.

But in his January 1997 letter, Storero told bishops that a senior church panel in Rome, the Congregation for the Clergy, had decided that the Irish church's policy of "mandatory" reporting of abuse claims conflicted with canon law.

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To this day, the Vatican has not endorsed any of the Irish church's three major policy documents since 1996 on safeguarding children from clerical abuse.

Irish taxpayers, rather than the church, have paid most of the $2 billion to more than 14,000 abuse claimants dating back to the 1940s.

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Colm O'Gorman, the Ireland director of Amnesty International, said: "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."

  alJazeera

P.S.

The Vatican has revised its guidelines on how the Roman Catholic Church will handle sex abuse cases.

The rules include a significant lengthening of the time period a victim can lodge an abuse complaint.

  alJazeera