Invent?No.
Repeat? Who's to blame for it happening?
Should you put your collective heads in the sand about what your own church is doing?
Sex abuse and international secrecy imposed by the Vatican
For 80 years, the Catholic Church did more than discourage the reporting of child sexual abuse, it enforced a policy of strict and absolute secrecy, punishable by excommunication. Noel Debien and Tiger Webb report on ‘crimen sollicitationis’, a papal decree with direct practical effects long after it was repealed.
I am pinging some others as they may recall the FR thread that was on that topic better than I can. It was some years ago.
Metmom..you will never get catholics to admit the depth and vileness of what remains within their church.....it’s so entrenched even the Pope’s who do want to deal with it cannot seem to dig up the roots, and that’s because the leadership would then also have to go for aiding and abetting the criminals. It’s not going to be resolved.
"Crimen sollicitationis" had nothing to do with secular criminal or civil courts. Nothing. The whole thing deals with Canonical courts and a very narrow, particular category of canonical violations.
The whole hubbub about "Crimen sollicitationis" was fomented by the BBC in 2006 when they stupidly made a huge category mistake: they didn't realize that it had no applicability to secular law.
Here is the 1962 document "Crimen Sollicitationis" referenced by the BBC Panorama documentary. It's clear that this refers to the crime of soliciting in the course of a sacramental Confession. Only that. Nothing else. Not sexual abuse in general, not dealing with children in particular. Just what happened DURING a sacramental confession, which would not even necessarily, in every instance, be illegal in civil law. (For instance, soliciting fornication with an adult is a filthy sin, but not a crime in civil law.)
Nothing new here: the Catholic Church maintains the confidentiality of the accuser, the accused, and the Sacrament of Confession itself (which it is has always been canonically obliged to do) when within her own courts.
Far from constituting a cover-up, it actually requires investigation and prosecution.
It looked to me at the time (2006) like BBC was just trying to put a hit on Pope Benedict XVI in the aftermath of the Regensberg controversy when they were mad at the him for his non-PC critique of Islamic violence.
It is important to look at what the letters and texts actually said, as contrasted to what you think they said.
On the contrary, it is unjust --- it is rash judgment --- to interpret texts by imputing the worst possible motivation, and to stick to that despite a sound and knowledgeable refutation.
Both Crimen S and the Ratzinger/CDF letter of 2001 deal with laicization of a priest for using the confessional for any form of criminal solicitation. No canon law requires silence in criminal proceedings; no canon law forbids, or could forbid, legal prosecution in a civil or criminal court. That is is distinction which seems to elude a lot of people.
This line of argument died down within a few years of BBC's "expose" when it became embarrassingly clear that they had bungled the whole thing in a very basic way.
I'm not going to go back through 8 years of papers to document this.
If you actually want to understand this, you need to read accounts by somebody who grasps the basics of canon law. The most accessible stuff, as I remember, --- at least, the place to start --- would be articles by George Weigel, John Allen, and Philip Lawler.
If this had constituted an actual obstruction of justice, international criminal courts would have shut down whole Catholic Church. I remember that Frances Kissling, then heading the fraudulent, pro-abortion "Catholics for Choice," (then called "Catholics for a Free Choice," funded by The Turner Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and -- oh yeah, the Playboy Foundation) demanded that they do so.
But it didn't happen. Gee. Wonder why.
I believe that you may be thinking of the following threads, and two in particular:
In 1922, the Vatican promulgated an instruction to do with what it called crimen solicitationis (the crime of solicitation within the confessional) and what it called the ‘‘worst crime’’ - the sexual abuse of children. The document was issued in Latin. No authoritative version was produced in English. The document was circulated only to bishops and under terms of strict secrecy....Other threads that discuss crimen solicitationis:
....The 1922 and 1962 Vatican instructions on dealing with allegations of clerical child sex abuse demanded absolute secrecy in the conduct of investigations. The secrecy was so pervasive that, to some, it seemed to demand that the complaint also be kept secret from the state authorities. Canon 1341 states that the bishop is to ‘‘start a judicial administrative procedure, for the imposition or the declaration of penalties, only when he perceives that neither by fraternal correction nor reproof, nor by any methods of pastoral care, can the scandal be sufficiently repaired, justice restored, and the offender reformed’’.
-- from the thread Vatican guilty of unholy compassion for paedophilesThe report by the independent Commission of Investigation, headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy, looked specifically at the handling of some 325 abuse claims in the Archdiocese of Dublin during the period from January 1975 to May 2004.
"The Dublin Archdiocese's preoccupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid-1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets," said the report. "All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities. The archdiocese did not implement its own canon law rules and did its best to avoid any application of the law of the state"....
-- from the thread Pope calls Irish church leaders to Vatican to discuss abuse report