THE NEW YORK TIMES
VATICAN CITY — In a rebuke to Ireland, the Vatican said Saturday that it had never discouraged Irish bishops from reporting sexual abuse to the police and dismissed claims that it had undermined efforts to investigate such abuse as "unfounded."
The Vatican's statement was the latest salvo in a diplomatic standoff with Ireland since the release in July of the latest in a series of scathing Irish government reports into sex abuse by priests and evidence of a widespread cover-up.
The report said the Vatican had encouraged bishops to ignore child-protection guidelines adopted by Irish bishops, including mandatory reporting of abuse to the civil authorities.
The July report found that clergy members in the rural diocese of Cloyne hadn't acted on complaints against 19 priests from 1996 to as recently as 2009, long after Irish bishops had issued guidelines in 1996 to protect children.
The Vatican also dismissed as "unfounded" a statement by the Irish parliament that Vatican intervention "contributed to the undermining of the child protection framework and guidelines of the Irish state and Irish bishops."
The Vatican said Saturday that claim was unsubstantiated and the result of a misinterpretation of a confidential 1997 letter to the bishops of Ireland by a former Vatican ambassador. The ambassador wrote that he had serious reservations about the child-protection policies adopted by the bishops under intense public pressure in 1996, saying that they violated the due process of canon law.
The report on the Cloyne case said that letter "effectively gave individual Irish bishops the freedom to ignore the procedures."
In its response Saturday, the Vatican noted that Irish bishops defined the policies as an advisory document and had never asked the Vatican to incorporate them into canon law.
It added that bishops had "never been impeded under canon law from reporting cases of abuse to the civil authorities."
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