Almost 5 million Italians watched a BBC documentary on sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church aired by the state-run TV after days of controversy, officials said Friday.The RAI program featuring the 2006 BBC documentary «Sex, Crimes and the Vatican» offered a rare chance to this overwhelmingly Catholic nation to deal publicly with the issue of priest abuse.
The broadcaster said those watching was a record for the weekly show, called «Anno Zero.»The show Thursday night featured long excerpts of the BBC documentary exposing abuse, including interviews with alleged victims.
It also invited Bishop Rino Fisichella, the rector of the Pontifical Lateran University, to defend the church.
The show examined a Vatican document written in 1962 regarding secrecy in church investigations of some sex abuse claims. The document has been revised - in the late 1960s, in 1983 when the Vatican updated the whole Code of Canon Law, and again when new procedures were put in place in 2001, in the wake of the sex abuse scandal in the United States.
Fisichella defended the document, saying it was not meant to keep victims from going to civil authorities. He said the church was close to the victims, but insisted the church also was damaged by such behavior.
"Those ... criminals should never have become priests," Fisichella said at one point.
The documentary caused a storm at RAI, as such open criticism of the church is rare in this country that hosts the Vatican. Some TV executives publicly opposed the decision, while politicians bickered for days over whether the documentary should be aired.
In Italy about 90 percent of citizens are at least nominally Catholic, and the Vatican still has influence here. Unlike Ireland or the United States, where the church has been rocked by massive scandals, no major case of sexual abuse has emerged here so far.
The BBC documentary was controversial also at home. British Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Catholic archbishop of England and Wales, said in a letter to the head of the BBC that while "no one can deny the devastating effects of child abuse in our society and the damage inflicted on the victims and their families," the documentary "sets out to inflict grave damage" to Pope Benedict XVI.
In his October 2006 letter, the cardinal accused the BBC of trying to connect the pontiff to cover-ups in the church. "This is malicious and untrue and based on a false presentation of church documents," Murphy-O'Connor said.
Until his election as pope in 2005, Benedict - then the Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the powerful Vatican office asked to deal with cases of sex abuse under the 2001 revision of the document on the issue.
Sotto Voce: Those of you who wish to watch this doucmentary can scroll to links on side of main page and go to section entitled Vatican & Sex Crimes - click on Sex Crimes & The Vatican and it will play for you.
I must advise that is 39 minutes in length and that some of the documentary may be disturbing in its content so please do be careful when atching that younger persons are not privvy to it.
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