VATICAN CITY (EWTN News/CNA) — Father Federico Lombardi said claims that the Vatican encouraged Irish bishops to not report sex abuse cases to police are untrue and ignore everything the Holy See has done to the counteract the issue.
“In attributing grave responsibility to the Holy See for what happened in Ireland,” Jesuit Father Lombardi wrote, “such accusations … demonstrate little awareness of what the Holy See has actually done over the years to help effectively address the problem.”
Father Lombardi clarified that his comments were not an official Vatican response, which is scheduled to be issued soon.
The Vatican spokesman made his remarks July 20 amid accusations by Irish lawmakers that a 1997 letter to Irish bishops sabotaged their child-protection policy by instructing them to handle abuse cases strictly by canon law.
The letter was highlighted in the recently issued report on the Diocese of Cloyne that identified nine cases between 1996 and 2005 which should have been reported by the authorities but were not. The July 13 Cloyne report is one of several government investigations conducted in the wake of frequently mishandled and covered-up abuse cases in the Irish Church.
Prime Minister Enda Kelly harshly criticized the Vatican on July 20, saying that Church leaders are steeped in a climate of “narcissism” and sought to defend their institutions as opposed to protecting children.
However, speaking to Vatican Radio, Father Lombardi argued that there is “no reason” to interpret the 1997 letter “as being intended to cover up cases of abuse.”
He explained that the letter was written to the Irish bishops’ conference by the then-papal nuncio in Ireland. It detailed how their 1996 document “Child Sexual Abuse: Framework for a Church Response” was problematic from a canon-law perspective.
Father Lombardi emphasized that the letter never told Irish bishops to only address abuse cases from a canon-law approach, but that some of the canonical details in the protection policy needed to be amended to prevent them from being invalid.
The letter “warned against the risk that measures were being taken which could later turn out to be questionable or invalid from the canonical point of view, thus defeating the purpose of the effective sanctions proposed by the Irish bishops,” he said.
Father Lombardi also clarified that there “is absolutely nothing in the letter that is an invitation to disregard the laws of the country.”
He said that any reference the letter had to bishops providing abuse information to police “did not object to any civil law to that effect” because civil law of that kind did not exist in Ireland at the time.
The Vatican spokesman called the criticism by the government “curious,” saying it’s as “if the Holy See was guilty of not having given merit under canon law to norms which a state did not consider necessary to give value under civil law.”
Father Lombardi was also critical of the accusations against the Vatican in light of everything Pope Benedict XVI has done to address the sex-abuse problem in the Irish Catholic Church.
He recalled the Pope’s “intense feelings of grief and condemnation” and that the Holy Father spoke openly of his “shock and shame” at the “heinous crimes” committed.
In addition to the Pope summoning the Irish bishops to the Vatican in December of 2009 and February of 2010, he also published a letter to the Catholics of Ireland, “which contains the strongest and most eloquent expressions of his participation in the suffering of victims and their families, as well as a reminder of the terrible responsibility of the guilty and the failures of Church leaders in their tasks of government or supervision,” Father Lombardi said.
He added: An apostolic visitation of the Church in Ireland — divided into four visitations of the archdioceses, the seminaries and religious congregations — also followed the Pope’s letter, and the “results of the visitation are at an advanced stage of study and evaluation.”
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Jehovah’s Witnesses pedophiles.
Many court documents and news events prove that Jehovah’s Witnesses require two witnesses when a child comes forward with allegations of molestation within the congregation. Such allegations have customarily been treated as sins instead of crimes and are only reported to authorities when it is required to do so by law, (which varies by state). It has also been shown that child molesters within the organization usually have not been identified to the congregation members or the public at large.
These people engage in a door to door ministry, possibly exposing children to pedophiles.
Although the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society claims that known pedophiles are accompanied by a non-pedophile in such work, there is no law stating that such a practice must be followed.
The Watchtower corporation has paid out millions in hush money already.
The Watchtower defenders will say do anything to protect mother Watchtower.
This is an abusive cult to children and adults.
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Danny Haszard
A few things from an Irish 18 year old,
Firstly, the Taoiseach (the Irish word for Prime Minister) is called Enda Kenny, not Enda Kelly. Secondly, this article does not detail the myriad of abuses committed by the Catholic Church in my country and the amount of harm it has caused by its cover-ups and deceit. There is absolutely no doubt in Ireland that the cover-ups by the Church were instigated by the Vatican- the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said as much on the news this evening, this goes against Lombardi’s statement.
Depressing. BTW: It’s Enda Kenny, not Kelly.
The Pope’s letters would also have had English translation. Perhaps Prime Minister Enda Kelly has difficulty with English comprehension.
The catholic church in Ireland is torturing victims of a number of crimes with the popes full backing, In 2002 he said victims of slavery had commited one of the worst crimes a christian could, He has never altered that statement, Does that sound like hes done every thing possible to help, Hes was asked kast year by two American catholic priests to set up centres across the world to help victims of abuse right, Like the one they help run, The silence from every one in the vatican says alot of how much they claim to care, In Australia both the church and state are fighting about who was to blame about putting children into adult mental hospitals, This was done by nuns in places like Brisbane
“Vatican Didn’t Aid Irish Abuse Cover-Up.” Isn’t this the response from the Church every time sexual abuse is uncovered?
THE PEOPLE OF GOD NO LONGER BELIEVE ANYTHING COMING OUT OF ROME! WE’RE ANGRY! GET IT!!!!!!!
Ireland should break diplomatic relations with the Holy See; enough is enough.
I love my Church hierarcy. I really do. But if Pope Benedict XVI wants to truly share in my grief and suffering he can start by revisiting the facts about Cardinal Bernard Law who continues to remain protected and shielded by the Vatican. That is just one example in which actions are speaking much louder than words and letters whose primary purpose is p.r. Until then, I will have a very difficult time believing the Vatican in situations like the one in Ireland right now.
This statement in the article above by the NCR author is absolutely NOT TRUE: “It [the papal nuncio’s 1997 letter to Irish bishops] detailed how their 1996 document “Child Sexual Abuse: Framework for a Church Response” was problematic from a canon-law perspective.” READ the papal nuncio’s letter; it is available on the internet. It offers NO DETAIL whatsoever about any specific way in which the bishops’ “Framework” for handling allegations of clerical sexual abuse of children violated or conflicted with any point of canon law. AB Storero, author of the letter, simply threatened reversal of the bishops’ decisions by the Vatican if they continued to follow their own guidelines for mandatory reporting to the police. Storero misconstrued—probably deliberately, since the bishops were already following their own guidelines at the time—the “Framework” as a “study” document. On this excuse, he declined to offer any specifics, even one detail, about how the “Framework” conflicted with canon law. He explained NOTHING to the Irish bishops and thus left them no way to amend their guidelines to accord with Storero’s understanding of canon law. (But read the “Framework” document: it documents in canon law each and every one of its internal procedures against accused priests. I’m no canon lawyer, but I can see that the bishops’ concern for the details of canon law is evident in their document.) No reasonable person who reads Storero’s letter can long entertain any doubt that the papal nuncio intended to direct the Irish bishops not to report allegations of child abuse to civil authorities. Such a directive is a sinful obstruction of justice, an arrogant assertion of church prerogatives of self-defense over just and and necessary criminal law in the state. Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s and the Irish people’s outrage over this interference is entirely warranted. And their outrage signifies, after a half-century of resistance to the reform council Vatican II, the beginning of structural reforms in the Irish church at last!
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