With the release of each government report in Ireland on the sexual abuse of children and youths by Catholic clergy and in Catholic institutions the same familiar patterns are revealed: utter indifference for the well being of children, deliberate cover ups by members of the Irish Church hierarchy, and directives from Rome to Church disregard legal requirements to report abuse to government authorities. It's the same patterns over and over again. Yet despite its obvious culpability, the Vatican has chosen to try to rebuke the Irish government for calling out the Church's true cesspool like nature. Given the Vatican's unrepentant behavior, one can only hope that the Irish state adopts even more stringent reporting requirements and, better yet, throws some of the lying, corpulent bishops and cardinal behind prison bars. As I have asked before, how can any moral person continue to financially support the Roman Catholic Church and/or continue to be a member of such a foul institution? Here are highlights from the New York Times on the Vatican's outrageous behavior:
VATICAN CITY — In a strong rebuke to the Irish government, the Vatican said Saturday that it had never discouraged Irish bishops from reporting the sexual abuse of minors to the police and dismissed claims that it had undermined efforts to investigate abuse as “unfounded.”
The Vatican also dismissed as “unfounded” a statement by the Irish Parliament that the Vatican’s intervention “contributed to the undermining of the child protection framework and guidelines of the Irish state and Irish bishops.”
The July report, the fourth in a series of scathing Irish government reports into sexual abuse by priests and evidence of a widespread cover-up, found that clergy members in the rural diocese of Cloyne had not acted on complaints against 19 priests from 1996 to as recently as 2009. The guidelines adopted by Irish bishops in 1996 required that abuse cases be reported to the police. The report pointed a finger at Rome for encouraging bishops to ignore the reporting guidelines.
The report cited a confidential letter to the bishops of Ireland from the Vatican ambassador in 1997, in which he said that he had “serious reservations” about the child-protection guidelines, and that they violated canon law.
The Cloyne Report said that letter “effectively gave individual Irish bishops the freedom to ignore the procedures” and “gave comfort and support” to priests who “dissented from the stated Irish church policy.”
The Vatican said Saturday that the letter had been misinterpreted. . . . The Vatican also dismissed as “unsubstantiated” Mr. Kenny’s assertions that the Vatican had tried to “frustrate an inquiry” into the sexual abuse scandal.
Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore, who also is foreign minister, described the Vatican response as “legalistic and technical,” and said he held firm to the view that the Vatican had interfered in the affairs of a sovereign, democratic state. The 1997 letter, he said in a statement, “provided a pretext for some to avoid full cooperation with the Irish civil authorities.”
Terrance McKiernan, the president of Bishop Accountability, which monitors sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church, said that the Vatican’s response “shows that the Vatican is still in denial.”
Irish government investigations have found that thousands of children were abused in state-run Catholic boarding schools from the 1930s to the 1990s. dioceses often moved predatory priests to new posts where they continued to abuse children, the government found, rather than turn them over to the police.
The Irish Parliament is now debating a controversial law that would make failure to report allegations of abuse to civil authorities punishable with jail time.
Like other modern day Pharisees, if Benedict XVI's lips are moving, the best bet is that he's lying. The continued repeating of lies may have worked in his days as a Hitler Youth, but I suspect that in Ireland the populace has belatedly awakened to the true hypocrisy and nastiness that are the main attributes of the Church hierarchy.
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