Vatican reportedly told bishops in Ireland not to report abuse - The Boston Globe

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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.

Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II’s diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory “gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature.’’

letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in US 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.

….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 Amnesty International.

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A BBC documentary broke much of the allegation about cannon laws prohibiting discussion of cases and reporting to civil authorities.  That documentary is available at:  http://catholicsexabuse.com/  Below is an extraordinary quote from that documentary.

The secrecy, the obstruction that I saw during my investigation was unparallelled in my entire career here as a prosecutor in Phoenix, Arizona. It was so difficult to obtain any information from the Church at all. In fact, we knew of certain meetings that had taken place, and yet no documentation was ever produced to be able to show that that meeting had even occurred. You know, when we started looking at it, it was really interesting. We came across in the Canons for the Church there are supposed to be secret archives where this information is to be kept, and not given to the civil authorities, no matter what the circumstances. There was an instruction from the Nunzio, because of his ambassador status, to shift all of this incriminating information to him, because under the law we could not subpoena that information from him, because of his ambassador status. I think that is really the story — the Church's failure to acknowledge such a problem, but not just a passiveness, it was in an openly obstructive way of not allowing civil authorities to stop the abuse within the Church. They fought us every step of the way.

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