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Abuse cover-up spreads to Britain
http://www.smh.com.au/world/abuse-coverup-spreads-to-britain-20100411-s0wu.html
Jonathan Wynne-Jones
April 12, 2010
LONDON: As the scandal over abuse cover-ups in the Catholic Church moves to Britain, it has been revealed that a priest who admitted indecently assaulting deaf boys at a school in Yorkshire has been allowed to remain as a cleric.
The Right Reverend Arthur Roche, the Bishop of Leeds, sent letters to the Vatican asking for advice on what action should be taken against Father Neil Gallanagh, after details of his offences emerged, but decided not to defrock him.
Victims' support groups said that the church's failure to pursue the toughest possible course of action against father Gallanagh seriously undermined its attempts to send a clear statement that priests guilty of abuse have been properly punished.
The disclosure comes as Pope Benedict finds himself embroiled in new revelations over child sex abuse, following the emergence of a letter signed by him as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1985, before he became Pope, resisting the defrocking of Stephen Kiesle, an American priest who had been convicted of offences against young boys.
The letter was typed in Latin and is part of years of correspondence between the diocese of Oakland, in the United States, and the Vatican about the proposed defrocking of Mr Kiesle, sentenced to three years probation in 1978 for lewd conduct with two young boys in San Francisco.
The Vatican insisted on Saturday that the Pope had done nothing wrong.
A Vatican lawyer said that it was the local bishop, John Cummins of Oakland, California, who bore primary responsibility for protecting children from the abusive priest, and that the Pope had acted appropriately when he declined to take action.
''It's the job of the bishop to discipline the priest,'' said the lawyer, Jeffrey Lena, of Berkeley, California, in an email to the Los Angeles Times. ''The Pope is not a five-star general ordering his troops around. That is simply an incorrect idea about the allocation of authority as between the Pope and his fellow bishops.''
In the letter, Cardinal Ratzinger - who was at the time the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has responsibility for tackling abuse by clerics - said the ''good of the universal church'' needed to be considered in any defrocking.
Mr Kiesle was ultimately defrocked in 1987. In 2004, he was sentenced to six years in prison after admitting molesting a young girl in 1995. Now aged 63, he is on the registered sex offenders list in California.
The Vatican says the Pope was exercising due caution before sacking the priest.
The decision not to defrock Father Gallanagh is likely to prove embarrassing for the church in Britain, which has until now escaped being dragged into the crisis that has engulfed the church in several countries.
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Britain’s top Catholic ‘protected’ paedophile
From The Times
April 10, 2010
David Brown, Sean O’Neill, Julia Bradshaw
The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols
The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales presided over a child protection system that allowed a paedophile priest to continue abusing schoolboys despite repeated complaints from victims, an investigation by The Times has discovered.
The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, chaired the church’s child safety watchdog in 2001-08 while Father David Pearce was repeatedly investigated by church officials and police. Despite a High Court ruling in 2006 awarding damages to one of his victims, Pearce remained a priest at Ealing Abbey, West London, where he groomed and assaulted one final victim before his arrest in 2008.
Pearce, 68, a Benedictine monk and former headteacher at the prestigious St Benedict’s School, was jailed for eight years in October after admitting a catalogue of sex offences against teenage pupils during 35 years at the abbey.
Archbishop Nichols last night denied any knowledge of the Pearce case while he was chairman of the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults (Copca).
Related Links
* Signature implicates Pope in abuse cover-up
* Abused Catholic boy whose life fell apart
* Catholic abuse bluster endangers its good work
Church officials said that Archbishop Nichols was not told the full details of Pearce’s child abuse offences until he replaced Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor at Westminster last year.
However, his predecessor knew of the allegations, a spokesman for Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor confirmed. The Cardinal has recently been appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to sit on the Vatican body that appoints bishops.
The Pope was further embroiled in the worldwide clerical abuse scandal yesterday by the discovery of a letter which purports to show that he resisted the defrocking of an American priest because of the effect it might have “on the good of the universal church”.
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