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There's your confusion right there. The bishop's responsibility when he has a pederast priest on his hands is (1) to cooperate with cops and criminal investigation.

And yet none of them did. Instead, they looked to the Vatican for help which generally resulted in being told to keep quiet and continue on as if nothing had happened.

The criminal matter was to be dealt with, totally and completely

Not if the police never knew about it. Not if the victim and his family were sworn to secrecy under threat of excommunication.

All the Holy See would have a hand in...

As evidence shows, the Holy See was told by one of its bishops that one of its priests was sexually molesting children, and the Holy See instructed that bishop to sit on that fact and not talk about it. To wait. "For the good of the universal church."

Sorry, Mrs. D. I don't have time to keep rebutting the vacuous, some would say evil defense of those who harbored and protected pederasts.

My suggestion is that you utilize all the time and effort you're spending defending the indefensible and put it to better use ridding your church of the pedophile mindset which obviously sees very little wrong with the status quo.

Dr. Eckleburg, I do not accept your idea that it is vacuous, and even evil, 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. 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 you.

Even the "good of the Universal Church"--- the phrase used in the 2001 Ratzinger letter --- has to do with whether a symbolic canonical trial for a dying man is the only option, in view of the fact that a canonical trial is such a cumbersome and time-consuming procedure. In fact, one of Ratzinger's most significant reforms, once he got these matters re-directed into the CDF,was to try to find speedier ways to act on them decisively by lessening the "procedural due process" required by canonical trials.

I'm not going to pursue this here because I can grasp that you are not interested in canon law per se. About the vile wickedness of sexual assault, and the moral obligation to prosecute those who are guilty of it, we both agree. Strongly. Let's leave it at that.

I'll hold my work on Veritatis until I can post it on some other thread.

Back to watering the tomatoes. See tagline.