Irish summon Vatican diplomat over abuse cover-up

Associated Press, by Shawn Pogatchnik, Jul 14, 2011

DUBLIN (AP) -- Ireland's government summoned the Vatican's ambassador Thursday for a rare face-to-face confrontation to respond to a report showing Rome secretly discouraged Irish bishops from reporting pedophile priests to police.

Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore was meeting Pope Benedict XVI's diplomat in Dublin a day after investigators found that the Vatican in 1997 asked bishops to defy the Irish church's new child-protection rules.

Wednesday's expert report found that a secret Vatican warning from the powerful Congregation for the Clergy encouraged Catholic officials who opposed the new official policy of reporting suspected pedophiles to police.

Before Thursday's meeting, Prime Minister Enda Kenny announced that Ireland would introduce new laws making it a criminal offense to withhold knowledge of suspected child abuse from civil authorities, even if that information is given to a priest in a confession booth - a major break with Catholic rules.

"The law of the land should not be stopped by a crozier or a collar," Kenny said.

Justice Minister Alan Shatter called Vatican interference in Ireland's child-protection efforts unacceptable. He said no foreign state should be dictating child-protection policies to any organization based in Ireland, particularly the Catholic Church, which owns and oversees most elementary schools and several hospitals in Ireland.

"It is unfortunate and unacceptable that, in circumstances in which the public in this country were given an assurance that particular guidelines would be complied with, that another state ... should have in any way interfered with that and confused the message," Shatter said.

In Rome, Vatican officials declined to comment. Vatican ambassador Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza's office in Dublin also declined comment.

Leanza has come under fire in Ireland for repeatedly rebuffing requests from Ireland's series of state-ordered investigations into decades of Catholic Church concealment of child-abuse crimes by its Irish staff. Last year he refused to testify before a parliamentary committee exploring the Vatican's role in the cover-ups.

Ireland's latest investigation into Catholic abuse cover-ups, directed by an Irish judge and published Wednesday, covered the 1996-2009 concealment of abuse complaints in County Cork. It highlighted the chilling effect of a 1997 letter from the Vatican to Ireland's bishops criticizing their 1996 child-protection policy, which for the first time made it mandatory for church officials to tell police of any suspected cases. The AP published that letter in January.

In the letter, the Vatican's then-ambassador, the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, warned Irish bishops that the Congregation for the Clergy had decided that such mandatory reporting of abuse claims to civil authorities conflicted with the church's secretive canon law. He said the Irish bishops, if they followed the new policy, risked suffering embarrassment if they did not stick closely to canon-law requirements.

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