The Vatican's mess in Ireland

As the Irish continue to work through the mess of child abuse scandals involving the Roman Catholic church, it appears that the Vatican, as recently as a few years ago, was instructing its bishops not to cooperate with civil authorities and to continue in the coverup.

Reported in thte HuffPo:

Ireland's government summoned the Vatican's ambassador Thursday for a rare face-to-face confrontation to respond to a report showing Rome secretly discouraged Irish bishops from reporting pedophile priests to police....

The latest investigation documents 1996-2009 concealment of abuse complaints in a County Cork diocese – and is seen in Ireland as particularly significant because it proves that, at least in the diocese of Cloyne, church leaders ignored their own 1996 get-tough rules.

The investigators deemed chilling a 1997 letter from the Vatican to Ireland's bishops criticizing the 1996 policy, which for the first time promised the Irish public that all bishops would be required to tell police of any suspected cases. The AP published that letter in January.

In the letter, the Vatican's then-ambassador, the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, warned Irish bishops that a powerful church body, the Congregation for the Clergy, had decided that such mandatory reporting of abuse claims to civil authorities conflicted with the church's secretive canon law. He said the Irish bishops, if they followed the new policy, risked suffering embarrassment if they did not stick closely to canon-law requirements.

And this is what happens when the good of the institution is placed above the good of the people. When the institution becomes its own reason for being.