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The BBC said Benedict enforced an
oath of secrecy on the child victim and witness or else face
excommunication. (Reuters)
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LONDON — Britain's Roman Catholic bishops and the
BBC were on a collision course Monday, October 2, over a documentary
accusing Pope Benedict XVI of systematically covering up Church child
sexual abuse before assuming the papacy.
"This aspect of the program is false and
entirely misleading," Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham
said in a statement on behalf of British bishops, reported Reuters.
"It is false because it misrepresents two
Vatican documents and uses them quite misleadingly in order to connect
the horrors of child abuse to the person of the Pope," he said.
A documentary aired by the BBC's flagship program
"Panorama" on Sunday, October 1, claims that Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger, the man elected Pope last year, was implicated in the
systematic cover-up of child sex abuse accusations against Catholic
priests.
The documentary, "Sex Crimes and the
Vatican", examined a 1962 document that set out a procedure for
dealing with child sex abuse within the Catholic Church.
The document, called "Crimen Sollicitationis",
imposes an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing
with the accusation and any witness.
Breaking that oath would result in excommunication,
the BBC said.
"The procedure was intended to protect a
priest's reputation until the Church had investigated, but in practice
it can offer a blueprint for cover-up," according to the
documentary.
"The man in charge of enforcing it for 20
years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man made Pope last
year," said the program's presenter Colm O'Gorman.
Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department that enforces doctrine,
from 1981 until his election as Pope in April 2005.
Father Tom Doyle, a canon solicitor reportedly
sacked by the Vatican after criticizing its handling of child abuse
claims, told the BBC that Crimen was "an explicit written policy
to cover up cases of child sexual abuse by the clergy, to punish those
who would call attention to these crimes by the churchmen."
Ashamed
But the British bishops rejected the BBC
accusation.
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Nichols said the BBC should be
"ashamed of the standard of the journalism used to create
this unwarranted attack on Pope Benedict XVI".
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"Since 2001 Cardinal Ratzinger, when head of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, took many steps to
apply the law of the Church to allegations and offences of child abuse
with absolute thoroughness and scruple," Nichols insisted.
He said the original 1962 document was concerned
not directly with child abuse but with the abuse of the confessional
by a priest to silence his victim.
Nichols, chair of the Catholic Office for the
Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults, said the BBC should be
"ashamed of the standard of the journalism used to create this
unwarranted attack on Pope Benedict XVI".
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, head of the
Catholic Church in England and Wales, has also written to the BBC's
director general, Mark Thompson, to complain.
The Vatican said it would not comment on the BBC
documentary for the time being but expressed full support for British
bishops' stern rebukes of the program.
BBC Defends
Despite the volcano of criticism, the BBC stood by
its stance.
"The protection of children is clearly an
issue of the strongest public interest," it said in a statement.
"The BBC stands by the 'Panorama' program, and
invites viewers to make up their own minds."
O'Gorman also lashed out at critics.
"What gets me is it's the same story every
time and every place," said O'Gorman, who was abused by a priest
as a boy and is now director of One In Four, an Irish charity which
supports people who have been sexually abused.
"Bishops appoint priests that they know have
abused children in the past to new parishes and new communities and
more abuse happens."
The BBC program has found seven priests facing
child abuse investigations living in and around Vatican City.
The Vatican document first surfaced publicly in
2003, when it was widely reported in the US media, and was used by
lawyers for sexual abuse victims in law suits against some American
dioceses.
The US scandal, in which priests known to have
abused minors were transferred from parish to parish instead of being
sacked, was centered in Boston.
It led to the resignation of the city's archbishop,
Cardinal Bernard Law, in December 2002.
Pope Benedict has been under fire from Muslims
worldwide since quoting a medieval text by a 14th century emperor
claiming that everything Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon
him) brought was "evil and inhuman."
