The Power of the Paedos - another high profile case hits the 'never happened' wall?

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Vatican has a holy spindoctor claiming the letter has been misunderstood.

His spin is far from convincing......

The Vatican defence is that "the Holy See wanted to ensure paedophile priests would not have any technical grounds to escape church punishment on appeal". However, the reality is that the Vatican simply moved paedophile priests from one diocese to another, allowing them to carry on abusing.

And Cardinal Ratzinger was at the heart of these crimes.

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.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan...understood