From the editor’s desk

Mischievous and wrong

The BBC Panorama programme has accused Pope Benedict XVI of enforcing a policy of secrecy over priests facing allegations of child sex abuse when he was a high Vatican official (see News from Britain and Ireland, page 36). The declared intention was to prevent victims and the church authorities reporting such cases to the police. In this case, consistent with Panorama's previous approach to investigative journalism, the BBC set itself up as prosecutor, judge and jury, and treated the Pope as guilty unless he could prove himself innocent. Even worse, it ignored the plain evidence under its nose that he was precisely that. The Catholic Church in Britain, like many other countries, has in place Vatican-approved guidelines that not only permit but oblige the church authorities to report such cases to the police.

It was as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in 2001 that the then Cardinal Ratzinger issued a new set of rules concerning priests who faced church sanctions following allegations that they had abused minors. In almost all cases the discipline in question was enforced laicisation, commonly known as defrocking. The secrecy the CDF demanded referred to the details of the disciplinary proceedings, not to the allegations themselves. Five minutes on the telephone would have cleared that up. The BBC's mischievous misrepresentation was made worse by its resurrecting of a long-defunct 1962 Vatican document, alleging that that too imposed a universal blanket of secrecy over clerical abuse of children. It did not; and in any case very few people (including very few bishops) knew of its existence. The BBC's tendentious coverage was made worse by the blatant introduction of footage - including a disgusting account by a laicised priest of how he went about seducing young girls - whose only purpose was to stir up prejudice. It had nothing whatever to do with the Pope.

It can hardly be denied that the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests is the worst stain on the Catholic Church's good name for centuries; the suffering it causes is appalling and long-lasting and the negligence of many church authorities in failing to deal with it effectively and in time is a matter of lasting guilt and shame (and in some cases, of cripplingly large awards of damages). And the supreme body set up to police the morals of the clergy and to prevent such catastrophes is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Cardinal Ratzinger's 2001 document was a tightening of the rules in belated recognition of this failure.

But questions remain. It happened on his watch. Most local hierarchies, at least in the West, were ahead of the Vatican in putting in place procedures and institutions to protect children and stop sexual abuse. Most of them have subjected their own past performance to searching review, and accepted sharp criticism where it was due. Without prejudging it in anyway, the CDF would do well to take a lesson from these local hierarchies and review its own performance. Perhaps it did everything it could. But there may be lessons to be learnt. However, it is unlikely such lessons would have anything to do with the subject matter of the BBC Panorama programme, which in its eagerness to slander the Pope, simply missed the point.