Pope Benedict XVI Led Cover-Up of Pedophile Priests?
If there is any truth to these charges, it will be a serious blow to the credibility of Pope Benedict. Liberal Catholics are already wary of him for a long list of reasons. Conservative Catholics who are hoping for good things from this papacy will become more wary because few of them will be able to find rationalizations sufficient to justify threatening sexual abuse victims with excommunication if they talk.
The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated. ...
Five years ago he sent out an updated version of the notorious 1962 Vatican document Crimen Sollicitationis - Latin for The Crime of Solicitation - which laid down the Vatican's strict instructions on covering up sexual scandal. It was regarded as so secret that it came with instructions that bishops had to keep it locked in a safe at all times.
Cardinal Ratzinger reinforced the strict cover-up policy by introducing a new principle: that the Vatican must have what it calls Exclusive Competence. In other words, he commanded that all child abuse allegations should be dealt with direct by Rome.
Patrick Wall, a former Vatican-approved enforcer of the Crimen Sollicitationis in America, tells the programme: "I found out I wasn't working for a holy institution, but an institution that was wholly concentrated on protecting itself."
Source: This is London
The report also quotes Father Tom Doyle, a former Vatican lawyer who was reportedly dismissed for criticizing the church for its handling of child abuse allegations:
"What you have here is an explicit written policy to cover up cases of child sexual abuse by the clergy and to punish those who would call attention to these crimes by the churchmen. When abusive priests are discovered, the response has been not to investigate and prosecute but to move them from one place to another. So there's total disregard for the victims and for the fact that you are going to have a whole new crop of victims in the next place. This is happening all over the world."
If the allegations can be substantiated to any reasonable degree, the political and legal fallout could be quite serious — and should be quite serious, too. Officials in the Catholic church who deliberately, consciously pushed policies which placed the political interests of churches ahead of the moral and legal interests of victims of sexual abuse deserve to be punished. The church shouldn't be the one to punish them because the church has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted with such responsibility. Civil authorities will have to be given this task and no one in the church should hide behind any traditional religious privileges — not if they have a moral bone in their bodies.
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Comments
One of the defences of ecclessiastical authorities of their “tolerance” of paedophiles is their assertion that they were unaware of the deeply recidivist nature of paedophilia. I cannot understand this assertion considering that for many centuries the Church should have had “intelligence” from its confessionals that sex acts with children were common and repeating. Notwithstanding the secrecy of the confessional (protecting names of penitants) surely it cannot be expected that the Church authorities were so naïve as to the real nature of this human abberation
As a child I went to Catholic schools. Around the late 1940s a Catholic religious was arrested for pedophilia. I can’t recall if it was a priest or teaching Brother. The case was well known because of media publicity. I was only around 12 at the time and didn’t really understand the seriousness of the case.
One of the teachers passed on the Church’s attitude to us. They seemed to resent the fact that the civil authorities became involved. The fact this man had committed a crime was not recognised. He had sinned against God and that was the important thing. The church looked on it as a religious matter where the man concerned had to confess his sin and seek God’s forgiveness.
The Catholic Church in it’s own eyes was above the law. Looking back now I don’t doubt the Church’s reputation had a lot to do with it.
Here in Phoenix, a bishop was involved in a fatal hit and run. He was driving while intoxicated. Many people wrote into the local newspaper that this is a church matter and the law should not be involved. This was not a church matter, the guy killed someone! If he had simply broken a church rule or maybe his vows, it might have been a church problem. He was prosecuted.