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Almost everything the public knows about both the Cloyne Report and the Vatican’s response to it has been filtered through the media.
The public therefore has a very faulty understanding of both documents and where the truth lies between the Irish Government and the Holy See in this whole affair.
For example, most people probably imagine that the Cloyne Report revealed that Catholic priests were sexually abusing children throughout the diocese down almost to the present day, and that the Vatican frustrated every attempt to control them.
This is simply untrue. In fact, with one exception, every concrete complaint of abuse received by the diocese post-1996 — when the Irish Church’s first set of child protection guidelines were issued — related to an incident that took place before 1996, and usually long before it.
The majority of incidents took place in the 1960s and 1970s.
Therefore, even if the letter sent to the hierarchy in 1997 giving the Vatican’s take on their guidelines is as bad as its worst critics say, it made very little material difference on the ground in Cloyne.
In fact, it almost certainly made no difference because we know that the diocese’s child protection officer, Monsignor Denis O’Callaghan, frequently ignored both canon law and the 1996 guidelines when dealing with allegations of child abuse.
That letter of 1997 is Exhibit A in the case against the Vatican.
And the Cloyne Report is right, it was unhelpful — although no more than that — chiefly because it had “serious reservations” about mandatory reporting.
Continue reading An uneasy peace follows Ireland’s war with Vatican
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- Image: Huffington Post
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