The revelation is timely for Irish Catholic bishops, but 14 years too
late for many people.
Last week's expose on RTE smacked of spin by the
Irish hierarchy, now under investigation by envoys from Pope Benedict.
Basing
its investigation on a 1997 letter from senior Vatican officials,
marked "strictly confidential" but recently leaked, RTE last week
pointed a finger at Rome.
It exaggerated by claiming that, "the Vatican
prevented Irish bishops from removing abuser priests and reporting them
to the authorities".
But what one of the Vatican's departments
did do was bad enough.
It put pressure on individual Irish bishops not
to implement a guideline that Ireland's Cardinal Daly had said publicly
had been agreed by the hierarchy.
That guideline should have meant that
all serious allegations of child abuse would be reported to the gardai.
Irish
bishops now fear that they alone may be blamed for the child abuse
scandal.
They wonder if a report being prepared for publication by those
papal envoys will ignore Rome's role in the mess.
Thanks to RTE,
it will now be much harder for the Pope's envoys to be harshly critical
of the Irish if they are not also critical of the Vatican.
However,
his envoys could be tempted to take an easier option by back-peddling
their criticisms of both parties.
That would be yet another disservice
to the abused and to the faithful.
Anyone unfamiliar with the
history of ineptitude and "mental reservation" that has marked the Irish
hierarchy's handling of child abuse may have formed the impression,
watching RTE's Would You Believe, that the Irish hierarchy had done the
best that it possibly could.
We even heard about Irish bishops standing
up to Rome -- always behind closed doors, of course.
Bishop
Michael Smith told RTE's Mick Peelo about a meeting in Sligo between
representatives of Rome and Maynooth, at which, he indicated, there were
unprecedented tensions and great unhappiness.
Even Cardinal Desmond
Connell got to look good, being said to have pressed the Vatican to take
decisive action when Rome was stalling on the suspension of an abusive
priest.
At their very public press conference in 1996, the
hierarchy made great play of a report commissioned for them, entitled
Child Sexual Abuse: Framework for a Church Response.
Cardinal Daly
confirmed that bishops had decided to report all serious cases of abuse
in the future.
But if this looked like a new policy of mandatory
reporting of abuse crimes in each diocese, it was not quite what it
seemed.
An unsuspecting public was scarcely aware of the
distinction between the hierarchy as a body (with little legal power as a
group within the Church) and individual bishops (who have real power
and are answerable only to the Pope).
The Vatican department known as
the Congregation for the Clergy knew the difference, and played on it.
In 1997, on its behalf, the Pope's representative in Ireland wrote to
each Irish bishop, stating that mandatory reporting "gives rise to
serious reservations of both a moral and a canonical nature".
The
Pope's man in Dublin, Papal Nuncio Archbishop Luciano Storero, also
pointed out that the Framework report for Irish bishops was "not an
official document of the Episcopal Conference but merely a study
document", and added, "I am directed to inform the individual Bishops of
Ireland of the preoccupations of the Congregation in that regard."
He
also asked that each bishop individually acknowledge receipt of his
letter.
Even more intimidating was a curiously constructed but
unmistakeable threat that, "in the said cases of accusations of sexual
abuse by clerics, the procedures established by the Code of Canon law
must be meticulously followed under pain of invalidity of the acts
involved if the priest so punished were to make hierarchical recourse
against the Bishop".
The abuser, not the abused, had priority of esteem.
Some
Vatican observers last week argued that the letter merely conveyed an
expression of opinion from one papal department which the bishops were
free to ignore.
But Irish bishops were unlikely to have seen it quite so
simply, and such an argument depends more on the making of nice
legalistic distinctions than on the real politics of Rome.
Few if
any bishops were willing to alienate Rome, either from a sense of
loyalty or a fear of giving public scandal or their own self-interest.
But, as individual citizens, they were free moral agents and nobody
"prevented Irish bishops from removing abuser priests and reporting them
to the authorities" had they wished to do so.
They could have
courageously faced the wrath of Rome instead of simply following orders.
RTE's
programme was worthwhile and well-made.
But its timing also happens to
suit Irish bishops. The Vatican, secretive and unaccountable to its
faithful as ever, refused to take part.
In a statement about the letter
last week, it tried to suggest unconvincingly that this was old news and
that the letter did not constitute an attempt to deter the reporting of
crimes.
The papal visitors currently in Ireland need to avoid
manipulation by any vested interests if their report is to be honest.
Their terms of reference should be interpreted as broadly as possible to
paint the fullest picture.
It is not clear what documents,
articles and books have been provided to the papal envoys, although it
is thought that even as basic a critique as the collection of essays
edited by Eamon Maher and John Littleton, The Dublin/Murphy Report: A
watershed for Irish Catholicism? (Columba Press), was not brought to
their attention at the outset.
There is a danger that, divided
between four dioceses, the envoys will find it hard to form a
comprehensive understanding of where both the Irish hierarchy and the
Vatican went so very wrong.
SIC: II/IE