MotoH said:
This is the one. It was on the televised news today or yesterday that this was supposed to be some sort of "what happens in the confessional, stays in the confessional" type of thing. I did not catch the whole report though, so I could be mistaken. I just got that article off of another forum which said that was the one being twisted.
I'm pretty sure you are mistaken/confused. That directive was written in 1962. Yes, it
was part of what directed the cover-up, but it isn't discussed in the paragraph you referred us to [see below]. In addition Ratsinger wrote a similar directive in 1996. Both of these were interpreted
by church officials, not by the media, to be instructions to cover these cases up.
-Page 2, boxed in blue, is where it says offenders can be transferred to other dioces rather than removed from the church.
-Page 9, boxed in blue, says if allegations "totally lacks foundation", documentation of them should be destroyed.
-Page 11, boxed in blue, talks about the secrecy of the trials.
-Page 15, boxed in blue, talks about communications secrecy and it being a serious sin to break that (as in: don't leak this to the press).
-Page 17 is a copy of the oath Priests take, which includes an oath of secrecy. It even says in clear language that secrecy trumps righteousness.
Though this is all interesting, it is a bit unnecessary. The church is arguing against a reality here: Secrecy existed. These cases were covered-up. Obviously, that's why we're hearing about them now and not 20 years ago. The only difference this makes is in whether the covering-up was an official policy or was just ordered for a few specific cases while existing mostly as a cultural component of the church. To me, that's a relatively minor difference.
The Vatican is trying to protect itself by blaming the local parishes/dioces for not dealing with the issue in order to show that the problem wasn't directed from the top down or systemic. The problem is, it existed in multiple
countries. It
was systemic. And the Vatican has known about it for some 50 years and is only just now starting to properly deal with it. That makes it a top-down, systemic problem.
The culture of secrecy really bothers me because it means there may be other crimes we don't know about. I'm particularly thinking about money. I consider tithing extortion anyway, but do priests ever get tempted by the money flowing through their parishes? Would we ever find out if a priest was skimming money and stashing it in a swiss bank account?
