"That's the most horrifying aspect of this document. This is not a catalogue of failure from a different era. This is not about an Ireland of 50 years ago. This is about Ireland now," Fitzgerald said.
The report said [Cloyne Bishop John] Magee and his senior aide for handling complaints, Monsignor Denis O'Callaghan, were blind to the reality that their protection of accused priests meant that more children could suffer molestation. It noted that, in one case, O'Callaghan told police the name of an alleged victim -- but refused to provide the name of the priest.
report condemned Magee's oversight of abuse cases as incompetent and deceptive.
It said he took no hands-on interest in enacting the Irish church's child-protection policies until 2008; established a bogus committee for reviewing abuse cases that never met once after 1995; and produced widely differing written records on one priest's case -- one for diocesan officials that omitted the priest's face-to-face admission of abusing children, the other a more detailed account for Vatican eyes only.
And Irish government leaders and abuse-rights advocates said the Vatican itself bore heavy responsibility for encouraging coverups since 1996.
They and the investigators emphasized that Ireland's bishops formally agreed in 1995 to begin reporting suspected child-abuse cases to police in rules that became valid Jan. 1, 1996. The Irish church took that step after the first abuse victims went public with their lawsuits, a development that opened the floodgates for more than 13,000 such cases.
But a confidential January 1997 letter from the Vatican's diplomat in Ireland to the Irish bishops warned them that the Irish church's child-protection policies were invalid under Catholic canon law; those internal church laws must be respected foremost; and any accused priests were likely to have any punishments successfully appealed in Rome.
The letter's author, the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, then Pope John Paul II's ambassador to Ireland, dismissed the Irish policy as representing "a study document."
Click on the following for the complete story: http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/World/20110713/ireland-report-catholic-child-abuse-110713/
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