I’ve seen some biased reporting, but that has to be some of the worst. In what purports to be a straight news story (instead of an editorial), the first paragraph outright declares that “the orders for this cover up were written in Rome at the highest levels of the Vatican,” the very thing the Church denies is true. And the only authority the author has is that a plaintiff’s lawyer (who stands to make millions by suing the Church) told him so.
It’s telling that there’s no actual reference to the document by name, and thus, no way of seeing for yourself what it says. But the document being referred to is * Crimen Sollicitationis*.
It’s absolutely a lie that it’s “a church policy that calls for absolute secrecy when it comes to sexual abuse by priests - anyone who speaks out could be thrown out of the church.” Instead, it’s related to the crime of solicitation – in which a priest makes sexual advances during Confession. It’s not limited to advances towards children, but any sexual advances during the Sacrament of Confession.
Most of the time, of course, the conduct in question isn’t even illegal. That is, the document wasn’t written as a cover-up of a civil crime, but as a procedure for quietly investigating whether or not a priest was desecrating the sacraments by using the confessional as a place to hit on parishioners.
And what’s made secretive isn’t the sexual abuse itself, but the proceedings of the Church tribunal. In other words, you can’t talk about the trial, or use information derived from the trial to either humiliate or vindicate the accused priest or the accuser.
An accuser is still completely free to go to the police – read the document
here, and see if it says anything to the contrary. So no, the plaintiff’s lawyer is lying, and CBS News is going along for the ride.
