Advocates for those abused by Catholic priests may have just gotten all the proof they were ever looking for that the Vatican was actively covering it all up, and committing crimes in the process:
A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure that victims' groups described as "the smoking gun" needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests.
This has enormous legal implications.
The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that Rome never instructed local 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 give that power to civil authorities.
In other words, the 1997 letter penned by
the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland
specifically instructed Irish bishops not to tell police about suspected or known child abuse within the church, and instead keep it all "in-house":
Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, "must be meticulously followed."
That's covering up a crime, and as far as I know, that's illegal everywhere.
As mentioned in the first line of my diary, advocates for the abused are thrilled at the discovery, if such a word as "thrilled" can be applied to this situation:
"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.
The Irish government may also be pleased by this latest discovery:
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 euro1.5 billion ($2 billion) to more than 14,000 abuse claimants dating back to the 1940s.
Perhaps this finding will give the much beleaguered Irish government a few extra Euros, if nothing else.
As mentioned, this has huge international implications, not just in Ireland. As I quoted one of the advocates above:
And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere...
Let's hope this leads to justice for a whole lot of abuse victims, and if "justice" means a big payday, I have no problem with that.
I originally found this story via the excellent science blog Pharyngula.