New story up at Religion Dispatches:
This week an Irish broadcaster revealed a Vatican letter from 1997 that appears to advise bishops to withhold priest sex abuse allegations from the police. The letter, written in response to Irish bishops’ policy of “mandatory reporting” and leaked by an Irish bishop, has been hailed by victim advocacy groups who hope this smoking gun will lead to definitive proof of the efforts of the Catholic hierarchy to impede prosecution of abusive priests.
As Catholic sex abuse scandals once again dominate headlines from Boston to Belgium, and even the fast-track canonization of Pope John Paul II is marred by questions of culpability, the role of the Catholic hierarchy in enabling clergy abuse seems indisputable, admitted even by die-hard church partisans like the Catholic League. But what’s less understood is how these same patterns persist in today’s Church, where demographic shifts and a dwindling priesthood may be creating a new set of scenarios for abuse.
