Quote:Vatican says Irish abuse letter has been 'misunderstood'

Victims groups claim 1997 letter is 'smoking gun' that shows the church enforced culture of concealing crimes by paedophile priests

Associated Press guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 January 2011 10.37 GMT

The Vatican said yesterday that a 1997 letter warning Irish bishops against reporting priests suspected of sexual abuse to police had been "deeply misunderstood."

The contents of the letter, in which the Vatican's top diplomat in Ireland told bishops their policy of mandatory reporting such cases to police "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature", were reported on Tuesday.

Marked "strictly confidential", the Irish broadcaster RTE said it had been given it by an Irish bishop. It has undermined persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in US lawsuits, that Rome never told bishops not to co-operate with police.

An Irish government-ordered investigation into decades of abuse cover-ups in the Dublin archdiocese concluded that Irish bishops understood the letter to mean they should not report suspected crimes.

And victims groups say it is a "smoking gun" that shows the church enforced a worldwide culture of concealing crimes by paedophile priests, of which Rome bears ultimate and legal responsibility.

"The letter confirms that the cover-up goes as far as the Vatican, that Vatican officials knew exactly what was going on, and that they proactively sought to deter Irish bishops from co-operating with civil authorities in Ireland," said Andrew Madden, a former Dublin altar boy who was raped repeatedly by a priest, Ivan Payne, in the 1980s.

However, the Vatican said yesterday the letter was intended to emphasise that Irish bishops must follow church law meticulously.

The Vatican spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, said the Holy See wanted to ensure paedophile priests would not have any technical grounds to escape church punishment on appeal.

It by no means instructed bishops to disregard civil reporting requirements about abuse, added the Vatican's US lawyer, Jeffrey Lena, who said the letter had been "deeply misunderstood" by the media.

At the time, there were no such reporting requirements in Ireland. In fact, the Irish bishops were ahead of Irish legislators in pledging co-operation with law enforcement as dioceses were hit with the first lawsuits by victims of abusive priests.

Yet as a result of the 1997 letter, most Irish dioceses never implemented the 1996 commitment to report all suspected abuse cases to police, according to the conclusions of the government-mandated investigation into the Dublin archdiocese published in 2009.

"This in fact never took place because of the response of Rome," the commission said in its report, although it quoted Dublin archdiocese officials as saying it was implemented there.

That eight-year inquiry interviewed two senior Dublin archdiocese canon lawyers involved in handling abuse complaints. They were quoted as saying the letter discouraged bishops from pursuing their 1996 initiative for fear of being overruled by Rome, as had happened in one notorious case of a serial paedophile.

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Quote:Further investigations revealed extensive travel since 2005 to countries notorious as sources of child pornography, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Spain and Germany.
A forensic examination of Lahey's computer and several memory sticks revealed hundreds of files and around 60 videos, some of them showing boys between the ages of eight and 12 engaged in sexual acts.
He was also in possession of numerous texts featuring themes of humiliation, degradation and slavery of young boys.
After some of the images were discovered Lahey initially denied having an interest in child pornography, but told the officers that he was attracted to males aged 20 to 21'.

Quote:Four men in court after police smash global paedophile ring

Lincolnshire police led operation to crack UK-based network distributing child pornography to 46 countries

Matthew Taylor guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 May 2011 18.34 BST

More than 130 children in the UK have been rescued from immediate danger after police smashed an international paedophile ring that distributed millions of indecent images and films to 46 countries.

Four men Ian Frost, 35, Paul Rowlands, 34, Frost's brother Paul, 37, and Ian Sambridge, 32 pleaded guilty at Nottingham crown court on Friday to various charges of making, distributing and possessing indecent images of children.

The Lincolnshire police force, which led the operation, said it was the biggest paedophile ring of its kind in the UK and that 132 children in had been "safeguarded" and a number of paedophiles had been removed from positions of trust, including jobs as teachers, doctors, youth workers and police officers.

Detective Chief Superintendent Roger Bannister said: "Protecting and safeguarding children has been our main focus throughout this investigation and it is satisfying for those involved to see these really good results. It has always been in my mind, and that of the investigation team, that every single face in the millions of child abuse images in this case is someone's daughter or son."

The four men masterminded an illegal uncensored newsgroup on the internet in order to circulate images and movies.

The UK authorities were tipped off by police in Germany in November 2005. The subsequent operation was jointly run by Lincolnshire police and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), but nearly all of the UK's forces, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency and several international law enforcement agencies were involved.

Police say that of those subscribers investigated in the UK so far, nearly two-thirds either admitted possession of indecent images or the images were found upon initial analysis of their computers. Police said the vast majority had been previously unknown to the police.

Peter Davies, the senior police officer heading CEOP, said: "Many of the images being shared online were horrific.

"The lengths to which people went to try and conceal their criminal activity were huge but did not prevent them being caught by persistent and dedicated work... Offenders out there thinking they can operate online anonymously should look at these results and think again." The net began to close on the gang in 2006 when officers raided Ian Frost's house in the small picturesque hamlet of Martin Dales in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, which he shared with Rowlands.

Police found an industrial-sized server that was so large that the lights in the room dimmed when it was turned on because of the amount of power it required to operate. Officers said it had a memory capacity of 4.5 terabytes, equivalent to 3.2m floppy disks.

Officers found other news services were being run by Paul Frost, also an IT worker, from Woodhouse in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Sambridge, a legal adviser, was running another from a property in St Albans, Hertfordshire.

Police estimate the group netted about £2m over seven years, although they did not appear to have had extravagant lifestyles. Of those receiving the illegal content, there were 211 in the UK, and 38 have been dealt with to date. Police said the largest number of subscribers were in the US.

Quote:Customers arrested and tried as a result of the operation include the Deputy Head of a Cumbrian NHS trust, who pleaded guilty to possessing indecent images of children, a scout leader and ex-school governor from Devon, and a school crossing patrol worker from Humberside.

Quote:At a briefing ahead of the court hearing, Detective Superintendent Paul Gibson, of Lincolnshire Police, said officers first received intelligence from German Federal Police in November 2005 that Ian Frost was running a news service that had an association with indecent images of children. Officers executed a search warrant at Frost's home in 2006 in the small picturesque hamlet of Martin Dales in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, which he shared with Rowlands.

Police found a piece of equipment Det Supt Gibson called a "raid array" - a redundant array of independent disks - which is made up of a number of hard drives wired together. Officers found the raid array had been operating an uncensored news service in Manhattan, New York, in 2005 before moving to the location in Lincolnshire.

Quote:Vatican recalls ambassador after Irish PM's comments on sex abuse row

Archbishop Guiseppe Leanza, papal nuncio to Dublin, returns to Rome following Enda Kenny's attack on Vatican role in cover-up

Henry McDonald in Dublin guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 July 2011 18.59 BST

Relations between the Irish government and the Roman Catholic church reached a historic nadir on Monday when the Vatican recalled its ambassador to Dublin, claiming "excessive reactions" in the Republic to the clerical child sex abuse crisis.

The Vatican confirmed that papal nuncio, archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, was returning to Rome for discussions over a damning report published earlier this month that had accused the Catholic hierarchy of undermining the Irish church's own policy of reporting child abuse to the authorities.

His recall followed an unprecedented and blistering attack by the Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, on the Vatican's role in the alleged cover-up of abuse in the County Cork diocese of Cloyne.

Vatican watchers claim that a recall is diplomatic speak for "showing displeasure" with some act of the host state and indicates a cooling in relations.

Since a historic denunciation of the Vatican in the Irish parliament last week, Kenny has become something of a hero-figure across the Republic. He received a standing ovation at a writers' summer school in County Donegal on Sunday when he said he had been "astounded" over the number of messages of support he had been given.

The Taoiseach's withering criticism of the Vatican is all the more historic given that his party, Fine Gael, has been traditionally the stoutest defender of the church's power and privilege in the Republic.

Kenny is a Catholic whose political base is rooted in Ireland's conservative, rural west.

Seeking to play down the diplomatic row between Dublin and the Vatican City on Monday night, the vice-director of the Vatican press office, Father Ciro Benedettini, said that the recall "should be interpreted as an expression of the Holy See for serious and effective collaboration with the Irish government".

But he added: "It denotes the seriousness of the situation and the Holy See's desire to face it objectively and determinately. Nor does it exclude some degree of surprise and disappointment at certain excessive reactions."

Breaking with decades of deference to the Catholic hierarchy both at home and in Rome, Kenny told the Dáil last week that "the rape and torture of children were downplayed or 'managed' to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, in power, standing and reputation".

He stuck to his critical stance over the Vatican and the Cloyne report at the event on Sunday.

He said that it reflected the way Irish people felt about the Catholic Church's role in the clerical abuse scandal.

The deputy editor of the Irish Catholic claimed on Monday night that most Catholics in the Republic would back Kenny rather than the Vatican in this controversy.

Michael Kelly said: "I would expect that the diplomats in the Vatican's secretariat of state will have been extremely surprised by the tone of Enda Kenny's speech in the Dáil, but also by the widespread and positive public reaction to the speech."

He added: "Mr Kenny was, I believe, articulating the sense of exacerbation that a lot of Irish people, not least Irish Catholics, have felt for too long about the church's disastrous inability to come to terms with this crisis."

Although Ireland's foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Eamon Gilmore, said the recall of the papal nuncio was a matter for the Vatican alone, one of his cabinet colleagues described the move as "appropriate".

Joan Burton, the minister for social protection, said that it was very welcome if there was going to be "deep reflection in the Vatican" into the Cloyne and indeed other reports that found the church hierarchy both in Ireland and in Rome culpable of covering up abuse scandals.

The Vatican has always looked upon Ireland as being one of its most loyal nations that always toed the Holy See's line on moral and social issues.

When Joseph Walshe was appointed Irish ambassador to the Vatican in 1946, the future Pope Paul VI told him that "you are the most Catholic country in the world".

But although abortion on demand remains illegal and most citizens still describe themselves as Catholic, the Republic's population is more secular minded than at any time in Irish history with divorce legal, contraception widely available and church attendance numbers falling.

Kenny's once unthinkable assault on the Vatican's role in Ireland was prompted by the Cloyne report's conclusion that the Vatican stymied Irish church policy of informing the Garda Siochana about sex abuse allegations levelled at its priests.

Yvonne Murphy, the judge who headed the Cloyne investigation, hit out at the Vatican's description of 1996 guidelines for reporting abuse allegations as "merely a study document".

She said that this led to the Bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, feeling he could deviate from measures other bishops had established to protect children.