Oh my… lookee here… why, it’s what I posted a few months back here on Questionable Motives and what the Guardian (from this article) calls a “smoking gun”: the Vatican’s official policy sent to bishops around the globe on how sexual abuse allegations were to be handled:
The 69-page Latin document bearing the seal of Pope John XXIII was sent to every bishop in the world. The instructions outline a policy of ‘strictest’ secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse and threatens those who speak out with excommunication.
They also call for the victim to take an oath of secrecy at the time of making a complaint to Church officials. It states that the instructions are to ‘be diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia [Vatican] as strictly confidential. Nor is it to be published nor added to with any commentaries.’
Bishops are instructed to pursue these cases ‘in the most secretive way… restrained by a perpetual silence… and everyone… is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office… under the penalty of excommunication’.
Is anyone with a working neuron still surprised that the scandal isn’t that abuse occurred within the Roman Catholic Church but that the official policy was to cover it up? Although catholic apologists will attempt to deflect this central issue (Commentator Nor1 scoffed to this official directive as merely a “dusty old document” here and wrote “its (sic) fairly clear that the Catholic Church is actually remarkably consistent with other institutions and organizations in its approach to dealing with this problem) to all kind of other reasons why the church is the real victim, the rest of us with a shred of morality not polluted by fanatical faith in the inerrant goodness of the church will see it for what it clearly is: another nail in the coffin of those who pretend that they and they alone hold the keys to what is moral but who really represent a corrupt institution.
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Questionable Motives 
Oddly I find comfort in knowing that the Church’s dirty little secret is out – this has has restored my faith in humanity a little. Someone leaked that document, and that someone must have had trusted access to it in order to leak it.
Comment by misunderstoodranter — April 21, 2010 @ 7:00 am |
Just goes to show that the religious will do anything to censor the truth from the public, so whilst I find comfort in the leak, there is still the stench of censorship leaking out of the Vatican, which I find deeply offensive.
Comment by misunderstoodranter — April 21, 2010 @ 11:50 am |