Core values of the Catholic church have been betrayed at the highest levels. The people who have been hurt most are the small, the weak and the innocent.
News from Ireland this week details what many Catholics have long believed: the highest levels in the Vatican suppressed reports that priests were sexually abusing children.
A Vatican document has finally exposed what many critics call the smoking gun. It told senior Irish clerics to halt their growing practice of helping police investigate sexual-abuse allegations against priests.
That order has long been suspected in Ireland and around the globe. Until now, the church hierarchy has staunchly maintained that it did no such thing.
But the evidence seems irrefutable. It comes in a letter obtained by the Irish broadcaster RTE.
A generation ago in Ireland, accusations of sexual abuse by priests were becoming widespread. Victims began suing the church.
Irish bishops became increasingly concerned. They began co-operating with police to identify and prosecute pedophiles. They ordered that all suspected cases of sexual misconduct must be reported.
Then the whip came down from Rome.
A 1997 letter from the late Archbishop Luciano Storero — labelled “strictly confidential” — warned about dangers of co-operating with secular Irish legal authorities.
Storero was Pope John Paul’s envoy to Ireland.
Irish bishops’ new practice of assisting police investigations, Storero wrote, “gives rise to serious reservation of both a moral and canonical nature.”
Any Irish bishop who tried to seek justice outside church law would face the “highly embarrassing” position of having his actions overturned on appeal by the Vatican, Storero added.
Implications of his letter could not be more chilling: the church would deal with problems internally; bishops who followed laws of the land and their Christian instincts would be censured.
The thinking behind this letter went far beyond Ireland. An American group called Survivors of Those Abused by Priests called Storero’s letter “the smoking gun we have long been looking for.”
“We now have evidence that the Vatican deliberately intervened to order bishops not to turn pedophile priests over to law enforcement,” director Joelle Casteix told The Associated Press this week.
Tragically, we all know now how the church dealt internally with its abusive priests: it protected them, counselled them, relocated them to different parishes when things got hot.
On the same day that the Vatican letter became public, the RCMP reported that a former priest who admitted sexually abusing aboriginal Canadian children is finally expected to face new criminal charges here.
Eric Dejaeger, 63, was born in Belgium but became a Canadian after coming here in 1973 to minister to northern Canadians.
He was a vicious sexual predator.
In 1990, he pleaded guilty to nine sex crimes against boys and girls in Baker Lake, Nunavut, between 1982 and 1989. He was sentenced to five years in jail.
His abuse, however, did not appear to start in Baker Lake. In 1995, he was charged with six counts of sexual assault and buggery on four people at a church posting in Igloolik between 1978-82.
Dejaeger skipped his court hearing and fled to Belgium, where he has been living illegally for most of the past 15 years.
The new charges against Dejaeger are unproven.
But if true, they are in step with a longstanding pattern in parts of the Catholic church.
Priests who were known or justifiably suspected of heinous crimes were counselled, protected and transferred to different parishes where they abused a new crop of children.
The Vatican’s practice of dealing internally with predatory priests created scores of victims beyond the people who were assaulted.
Particularly in the United States, the civil litigation capital of the world, victims have sued parishes and won substantial damages.
Parishes have been bankrupted, churches closed and innocent Catholics have lost places of worship and close ties with communities of faith.
In Ireland, blameless taxpayers have paid $2 billion to settle more than 14,000 sexual abuse claims against clergymen dating back half a century.
This week’s public disclosure of Storero’s letter promises to change the legal and moral landscape.
It shows that the Vatican, not just individual churches or dioceses, helped cover up crimes through denial and deceit.
The church itself — one of the wealthiest organizations on Earth — must change its practices and make reparations.
But even today, despite public apologies for sins committed in the past, Pope Benedict XVI has not ordered bishops to report sex crimes to police.
Joe McLaughlin is the retired former managing editor of the Red Deer Advocate.