Community | January 18, 2011 | 34 comments

1997 letter from the Vatican warned Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police

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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 coverups.

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. Instead, the letter 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 requests for comment 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 Canada and 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," said Colm O'Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International. "And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere."

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 child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state.

Policy in place for years?

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 coverups, concerning the southwest Irish diocese of Cloyne, is expected to be published within the next few months.

Two state-commissioned reports published in 2009 unveiled decades of coverups 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 a senior church panel in Rome, the Congregation for the Clergy, had decided the Irish church's year-old policy of "mandatory" reporting of abuse claims conflicted with canon law.

Irish church told to follow '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."

Storero, who died in 2000, wrote, without elaborating, 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 the 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 coverup of hundreds of child-abuse cases in the Dublin Archdiocese. The letter itself, marked "strictly confidential," has never been published before.



Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2011/01/18/vativan-letter-sex-abuse-ireland.html#i...
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34 comments // 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police

  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  

    • Jesus calling Peter the rock is what established the Catholic Church, right? No one talks about where Peter said Jesus was the stone.

      What's th' difference between a rock and a stone Pray Tell?

    • 1 year ago
  • Gravity_Man
  • brianrebel
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • brianrebel:

      In the pipeline => Rev. 18 vs 21 "swift pitch hurled into the sea". God hates them more than even we do. Read on at verse 23 where it accurately tells us the merchants would become the top-ranking men on earth!

      Hope ya make it man. What comes after is great. Rev. Ch. 7 "great crowd". You can be in it.

    • 1 year ago
  • jimbones2045
    • +1
      jimbones2045  

    • When are people gonna learn that the Vatican is nothing but a scam? I'm actually now sick of hearing about it. I'm to the point where i am going to ignore everything said about the church and the sheep that follow it. The only way to make something annoying go away is to ignore it long enough so that everyone else looses interest in it to.

      I mean, we could try to preach against god and the church. But what better way is there to convince someone to do something than to tell them NOT to do it. Think of parents telling their teenagers that they can't go to the Raging Sex Monkeys concert because it's inappropriate and wrong. That's when your ready to do whatever it takes to get to that concert. It's all about feeling like your in control of your life, and if your not in control of it then God is and thus everything is okay.

      Grow up people. There is no such thing as control except for the control of other people.

      AND your confessing your sins to someone who could have potentially raped a young boy. Why are priests so special? Why do we need them to guide us?

      It's because we're children, they are our father's, and god is our creator.

      Fuck that.

      Oh, by the way, anyone know why priests can't get married? No? Well I'll tell you.
      Back in the days of middle England when the Catholic church was really picking up speed, it was decided that priests weren't allowed to marry. Not because priests are meant to be completely in love with God. Not because women warp the minds of men and force them to be incapable of communicating with god. But because without a wife there is no son. Without a son there is no heir. Without an heir there is no one to collect the priests inheritance. Except the church.

      Amen.

    • 1 year ago
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • jimbones2045:

      Very interesting ideas there at the last. Actually it's something from the book of Revelation concerning the Elect of God the martyrs aka the 144,000 => however the Vatican cherry picks what it wants. They reject the teaching of the 144,000 but decided to use the idea of not getting married when in fact it had nothing to do with physical marriage in the first place.

      The 144,000 Elect are Christ's Bride and they are to remain chaste to Christ and not get married spiritually to any false Christ wannabees. Revelation is very symbolic that way and marvelous to learn. Unfortunately the Roman Catholic Church has excelled at corrupting Holy Scripture.

      They got worse as time went on. They just reach in and drag out of the Bible whatever works to their advantage. Anything they don't like (reduces the Sunday take) they decided to toss. Which all goes a long way to explain why they are such a large Cult spread like kudzu all over the planet.

      Jesus is coming and he will rid it for us. Have faith!
      Trust in Jesus [to rid the Earth of such false religions]!

    • 1 year ago
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  

    • I wonder if... Jesus was right-handed so all the Popes the Church has picked was left-handed... we could be onto something. I would suspect most priests are also similarly lefties. It puts men at a severe disadvantage in a "right hand world" so many lefties choose SAFETY in the Church!

      No sense asking the Pope => he would just lie about that too.

    • 1 year ago
  • Jpwhoregan
  • Gravity_Man
    • -2
      Gravity_Man  
    • Jpwhoregan:

      To draw that conclusion you have to call everybody in the Bible a liar. Back then they ate a lot of seafood & fish, which is BRAIN FOOD. So if they were duped they were duped by the best brains in history. But basically it's almost a tossup I suppose. We could even deny everybody that lived before each of us was born too. Why stop at just Jesus?

      You have been poisoned my friend as all people today have been, poisoned with lies from False Religion. I wouldn't expect you to feel any other way. But let's just say for a moment that the Bible is all real, and correct, then if you allow all these people Popes ministers and charlatans to get in the way between YOU and the KINGDOM DOORS is that all their fault?

      No, because you laid down like a doormat and let it happen. If you want to settle the matter once and for all you have to strap on the gloves and walk into the ring and face what you fear or hate -> the Bible. Or, you can do what most people do and ask a neighbor over the backyard fence who doesn't know anymore than you do and accept that.

      For myself I decided long ago I didn't want to die ignorant. If I die I want to know why I died. So I studied, knocked on the door, banged on the door and demanded answers. They were provided to me. Then in 1989 after a horrific pounding I took from a 1,000 lb.bale that hit me and bounced on me three more times from an 8 foot drop, a few months later a tremendous insight came to me I did not expect. I suddenly understood how to solve the World's "Energy Shortage" by harnessing lightning.

      The reason you see France and India producing air-powered cars today is because of me. In 2003 the air-powered car had been shoved in front of the bus and ran down. I came across a compressed nitrogen engine that had ran in 1997 but it only achieved 30 mph at most. So I studied it for 3 days and then understood why it failed. It needed a catalyst, a driver.

      I brought air power back from the grave everyone wanted it to remain in. But they won';t give you my engine because it reflects God's Creation. They don't want that. They don't want anyone to know. They want you a godless robot hating God for not fixing things.

      My engine runs like a mechanical heart. It is in essence a Living Engine. It is an engine that praises our Creator. It will out horsepower every engine on this planet recyling a "fuel" of compressed air and steam, both easily made as the car travels down the highway, so you never have to stand in the cold at a fuel pump ever again.

      The life you have now minus Bible restrictions sucks rotten eggs because it also deprives you of the glory you deserve as a child of God.

      You want it, you got it.

    • 1 year ago
  • Prijedor
  • Gravity_Man
  • Jpwhoregan
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • Jpwhoregan:

      Your assessment carries little real value. What we call "real" today "is passing away and so is its desire, but he who does the Will of God remains forever". 1 John 2 vss 15-17 were true 2,000 years ago; they are much more true today.

      Prophetic true soon becomes true true.

      I show snippets of the new reality that's already in the pipeline. If you can't grasp these things we know your fate in advance. Your destiny rivals the Pope's. His destiny stinks.

    • 1 year ago
  • Gravity_Man
  • Jpwhoregan
  • Dejan_Croatia
    • +5
      Dejan_Croatia  

    • religion is fucken bullshit, though the people that represent it are fucken dumb the religion itself whether its islam or Christianity is fucken made up used to control people like fucken lamps.

    • 1 year ago
  • Gravity_Man
  • keithponder
    • +5
      keithponder  

    • Look at this freakin' perp. I thank God that my parents were not Catholics. You go and confess your sins to these pedophiles through a damn box, and they're faces are hidden from you on the other side because they're too busy beatin' off.

      "Father, Father I have sinned. Oh really ? Tell me all about it son".

      Yuck.

    • 1 year ago
  • Prijedor
  • artemis6
    • 0
      artemis6  

    • I bet there are more dirty little church secrets out there . Leak them all . Let them be judged ! Most important , let us protect children from them .

    • 1 year ago
  • bundlebear
    • +3
      bundlebear  

    • i went to catholic school during the 80's and i was never molested but nuns would beat the hell out of me and it made me wonder how people who believed in love for your fellow man could harm children. i haven't been in a church since i left school and i don't plan on it ever again

    • 1 year ago
  • Gravity_Man
  • jubal
    • +2
      jubal  

    • I am so glad someone posted this story...it needs to be published far and wide. The church is the whore of Babylon...and who is Babylon? The world wide Capitalist empire...that's who. The church has been keeping people in line using fear for a very long time telling people that its against god's commandment to murder...especially the rich. Its the whole reason religion was created in the first place.

      Now spiritual enlightenment is another matter entirely...it has nothing to do with religion whatsoever.

    • 1 year ago
  • KSirys
  • eden49
  • Gravity_Man
    • -5
      Gravity_Man  
    • eden49:

      Hey Eden, makes ya want a hug eh? Whew.

      Hey Eden, I got something JUICY FOR YA down under. http://www.groupon.com it's a new startup in the US out west. In business for just TWO YEARS and Google offered them $6,000,000,000.00 >>> AND THE GUY REFUSED. Hasn't many people heard of it. You might get the entire Australian franchise.

      Dang it I wish I was you Eden.

      Oops. heh heh heh

      You're a hen sitting on a golden egg sweetie!

    • 1 year ago
  • littlwarrior
    • +4
      littlwarrior  

    • This whole thing is just fucked up it makes me want to vomit. This your religion people, this is what is perfect and infallible, this is what thousands have killed and died for. Was it worth it?

    • 1 year ago
  • JETaylor
  • toyotabedzrock
  • bundlebear
  • randallr01
    • +7
      randallr01  
    • bundlebear:

      Considering the fact that Santa Clause was conjured in order to train kids into believing in a fictitious character (aka god), this "pope as evil santa" photo is not that far from reality.

    • 1 year ago
  • bundlebear
  • coolplanet
  • Gravity_Man
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