Trust cannot be taken for granted just because it is on the letterhead. The BBC Trust's handling of a complaint against the "Panorama" television programme "Sex Crimes and the Vatican", transmitted in 2006, will dismay those who had hoped the recently revised arrangements for dealing with complaints would quickly rebuild confidence in the BBC's integrity. The Trust's newly published report reveals that it has dismissed a complaint from a member of the public on grounds that do not stand up to scrutiny. The BBC ought at the very least to look at the matter again.

The "Panorama" allegation was that the Vatican, particularly Pope Benedict when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had imposed strict secrecy backed by the threat of excommunication on anyone who reported a priest for sexual abuse of a child. If true, it was a monstrous cover-up. It would have prevented any investigation of such allegations by the police. The programme's key evidence was a 1962 Vatican document "Crimen Sollicitationis", which was mainly concerned with priestly abuses of the confessional but which could also be applied to allegations of child abuse. The programme alleged that Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, not only left this in force but updated it in 2001, with similar sanctions.

In support of this general charge, "Panorama" cited the findings of an Irish Government inquiry into the shameful record of clerical child abuse in the Diocese of Ferns - almost all of it prior to 2001. But as The Tablet reports today, the Ferns Report says no such thing. The diocese had never heard of the 1962 document. The report said Vatican policy was to leave the investigation of child abuse allegations to the police, not to obstruct them; if necessary its own processes would be suspended so the criminal law could run its course.

The Trust appears not to have made its own inquiries into the truth of the "Panorama" ...

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