Readers Blog: Vatican must come clean about abuse cover-up
While I welcome the Pope to Ireland, he is also the head of the Vatican, the bizarre state created in a 1929 pact with Mussolini, an absolute monarchy which has used diplomatic immunity and the secretive, parallel legal system of canon law to avoid justice and paying compensation to victims of sexual abuse, while setting the Church’s governance rules and being home to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Inquisition), the body charged with disciplining errant priests.
A grand jury report in Pennsylvania has revealed that Church leaders covered up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over 70 years, persuading victims not to report abuse and law enforcement not to investigate it.
It identified over 1,000 victims, said there are probably thousands more and that Church officials who protected abusers remained in office. Some were even promoted.
Remember Cardinal Bernard Law, the late Archbishop of Boston, who transferred sexually abusive clergy among parishes for years without alerting parents or police, who was portrayed in the film Spotlight? He was appointed archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the main basilicas in Rome.
The report revealed Church officials followed a “playbook for concealing the truth”. Attorney general Josh Shapiro said “they protected their institution at all costs.
As the grand jury found, the Church showed a complete disdain for victims” and that the cover-up by Church officials “stretched in some cases all the way up to the Vatican”. Fr Hans Kung wrote in an open letter to Catholic Bishops in 2010:
“There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up cases of sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the CDF under Cardinal Ratzinger”.
The Murphy Report revealed that the Church’s priorities were the maintenance of secrecy, avoidance of scandal, protection of its reputation and preservation of its assets.
We know that the Vatican refused to co-operate with State inquiries into the handling of clerical child sex abuse and sought to bury documents and an indemnity from the State from compensation costs.
I invite anyone who doubts the Vatican had any role in the cover-up of sexual abuse to read “The Case of the Pope” by the eminent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson.
I respectfully ask the Pope to come clean about the Vatican’s role in the cover-up of child sexual abuse.
