Fr. 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,” Fr. Lombardi, S.J., wrote, “such accusations … demonstrate
little awareness of what the Holy See has actually done over the years
to help effectively address the problem.”
Fr. 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 Wednesday, 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, Fr. 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.
Fr.
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.
Fr. 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.”
Fr. 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 pontiff 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,” Fr. Lombardi said.
An Apostolic Visitation of
the Church in Ireland – divided into four visitations of the
archdiocese, 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,” he said