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'Sex Crimes and the Vatican' documentary hits raw nerve in
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Irish Times - May 25, 2007
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2007/0525/1179498781702.html
O'Gorman documentary on abuse sparks row in Italy
by Paddy Agnew
Rome Letter: So, who's afraid of Sex Crimes and the Vatican, the BBC
Panorama programme on clerical child abuse presented by One In Four
director Colm O'Gorman and aired last October?
When the experienced, sometimes controversial, TV journalist Michele
Santoro applied for the right to buy the programme (asking price
€25,000) for last week's edition of his weekly current affairs programme
Annozero on Italian state broadcaster RAI, he found himself at the
centre of a major political row.
Mario Landolfi, head of parliament's oversight committee for RAI, called
on RAI director-general Claudio Cappon to block the programme, calling
it "a media execution squad, ready to open fire on the Vatican".
Centrist politician Antonio Satta said the programme was "trash
journalism", which "starts with a premise and does everything to prove
it despite the way things really were".
When enterprising bloggers put the documentary on the web, L'Avvenire,
the newspaper controlled by the Italian Bishops' Conference, accused
them of spreading "wicked slander".
Not that such condemnation stopped the programme from becoming the most
popular and most-clicked film on Google Video Italia
(www.video.google.it).
When Sex Crimes and the Vatican came out last October, it was
immediately condemned by senior figures in the Catholic Church in
England, with Archbishop of Birmingham Dr Vincent Nichols suggesting
that part of the programme dealing with Pope Benedict was false because
"it misrepresents two Vatican documents and uses them quite misleadingly
in order to connect the horrors of child abuse to the person of the
Pope".
One very serious accusation made by the programme is that the Vatican's
1962 document, Crimen Sollicitationis offered a de facto blueprint for a
cover-up.
In the 2005 Ferns Report into clerical sex abuse in the diocese of
Ferns, mention is made of Crimen Sollicitationis, with the report
commenting: "It [Crimen Sollicitationis] is of interest to the inquiry
as it also specifically dealt with how the priests who abused children
were to be handled and imposed a high degree of secrecy on all church
officials involved in such cases.
"The penalty for breach of this secrecy was automatic excommunication.
Even witnesses and complainants could be excommunicated if they broke
the oath of secrecy."
In the programme, Colm O'Gorman points an accusatory finger at Pope
Benedict, saying that "the man in charge of enforcing it [Crimen
Sollicitationis] for 20 years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man
made Pope last year [April 2005]".
At another moment in Italian political life, perhaps this programme
would have provoked less fuss.
At another time, perhaps those willing to criticise it (without first
having seen it?) would acknowledge that a programme assessing the pain
and sorrow of child sex abuse (clerical or otherwise) had every good
reason to be aired.
Yet the fact is that the row about Sex Crimes and the Vatican comes
right in the middle of a heated debate about just how much political
influence is wielded by the Italian Catholic Church. That row relates to
the current plans of the centre-left government led by Romano Prodi to
introduce legislation that would grant greater legal rights to unmarried
couples, including gay couples.
More than one million people protested in Rome against this proposed
legislation, prompting some commentators to suggest that the government
is out of touch with the views and feelings of the majority of Italian
citizens.
In such a context, some senior Vatican figures see the Sex Crimes and
the Vatican programme as part of an anti-Church conspiracy: "People just
want to sully the face of the Church and throw mud at the Catholic
priesthood.
"This is all old stuff, there's somebody who just wants to stir up a
scandal," Spanish cardinal Julian Herranz, president of the Council for
Legislative Texts (a Holy See constitutional body), said this week.
In an interview with Rome daily La Repubblica, Cardinal Herranz
staunchly defends the Catholic Church's handing of clerical sex abuse
cases, denying that the basic policy was merely to move the offending
priest to another post: "You have to take it case by case. There has
been such a huge media fuss about the whole business. I repeat - you can
suspend a suspected priest and move him on. Sometimes moving him on
guarantees the freedom of witnesses, sometimes it guarantees the priest
himself, making the whole process easier at every level.
"I don't believe that there was less sensitivity to this problem in the
past. The fuss that there was in the USA is not linked to precise facts
but reflects the scandalistic interests of certain sectors [of
society]," said Cardinal Herranz.
"The growth of the Catholic Church in the USA did not please everybody
and some people wanted to humiliate the Church in the eyes of public
opinion. And that is not to talk of the huge interests shown in the
cases by lawyers, just like those involved in car crashes."
Perhaps, even now, not everyone in the Vatican has quite understood the
dimensions of the clerical sex abuse phenomenon.
Perhaps some senior clerics would do well to watch the programme when,
belatedly, it is finally aired in Italy on Wednesday next week.
© 2007 The Irish Times
================================================================
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Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
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Hash: SHA1
'Sex Crimes and the Vatican' documentary hits raw nerve in
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Irish Times - May 25, 2007
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2007/0525/1179498781702.html
O'Gorman documentary on abuse sparks row in Italy
by Paddy Agnew
Rome Letter: So, who's afraid of Sex Crimes and the Vatican, the BBC
Panorama programme on clerical child abuse presented by One In Four
director Colm O'Gorman and aired last October?
When the experienced, sometimes controversial, TV journalist Michele
Santoro applied for the right to buy the programme (asking price
€25,000) for last week's edition of his weekly current affairs programme
Annozero on Italian state broadcaster RAI, he found himself at the
centre of a major political row.
Mario Landolfi, head of parliament's oversight committee for RAI, called
on RAI director-general Claudio Cappon to block the programme, calling
it "a media execution squad, ready to open fire on the Vatican".
Centrist politician Antonio Satta said the programme was "trash
journalism", which "starts with a premise and does everything to prove
it despite the way things really were".
When enterprising bloggers put the documentary on the web, L'Avvenire,
the newspaper controlled by the Italian Bishops' Conference, accused
them of spreading "wicked slander".
Not that such condemnation stopped the programme from becoming the most
popular and most-clicked film on Google Video Italia
(www.video.google.it).
When Sex Crimes and the Vatican came out last October, it was
immediately condemned by senior figures in the Catholic Church in
England, with Archbishop of Birmingham Dr Vincent Nichols suggesting
that part of the programme dealing with Pope Benedict was false because
"it misrepresents two Vatican documents and uses them quite misleadingly
in order to connect the horrors of child abuse to the person of the
Pope".
One very serious accusation made by the programme is that the Vatican's
1962 document, Crimen Sollicitationis offered a de facto blueprint for a
cover-up.
In the 2005 Ferns Report into clerical sex abuse in the diocese of
Ferns, mention is made of Crimen Sollicitationis, with the report
commenting: "It [Crimen Sollicitationis] is of interest to the inquiry
as it also specifically dealt with how the priests who abused children
were to be handled and imposed a high degree of secrecy on all church
officials involved in such cases.
"The penalty for breach of this secrecy was automatic excommunication.
Even witnesses and complainants could be excommunicated if they broke
the oath of secrecy."
In the programme, Colm O'Gorman points an accusatory finger at Pope
Benedict, saying that "the man in charge of enforcing it [Crimen
Sollicitationis] for 20 years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man
made Pope last year [April 2005]".
At another moment in Italian political life, perhaps this programme
would have provoked less fuss.
At another time, perhaps those willing to criticise it (without first
having seen it?) would acknowledge that a programme assessing the pain
and sorrow of child sex abuse (clerical or otherwise) had every good
reason to be aired.
Yet the fact is that the row about Sex Crimes and the Vatican comes
right in the middle of a heated debate about just how much political
influence is wielded by the Italian Catholic Church. That row relates to
the current plans of the centre-left government led by Romano Prodi to
introduce legislation that would grant greater legal rights to unmarried
couples, including gay couples.
More than one million people protested in Rome against this proposed
legislation, prompting some commentators to suggest that the government
is out of touch with the views and feelings of the majority of Italian
citizens.
In such a context, some senior Vatican figures see the Sex Crimes and
the Vatican programme as part of an anti-Church conspiracy: "People just
want to sully the face of the Church and throw mud at the Catholic
priesthood.
"This is all old stuff, there's somebody who just wants to stir up a
scandal," Spanish cardinal Julian Herranz, president of the Council for
Legislative Texts (a Holy See constitutional body), said this week.
In an interview with Rome daily La Repubblica, Cardinal Herranz
staunchly defends the Catholic Church's handing of clerical sex abuse
cases, denying that the basic policy was merely to move the offending
priest to another post: "You have to take it case by case. There has
been such a huge media fuss about the whole business. I repeat - you can
suspend a suspected priest and move him on. Sometimes moving him on
guarantees the freedom of witnesses, sometimes it guarantees the priest
himself, making the whole process easier at every level.
"I don't believe that there was less sensitivity to this problem in the
past. The fuss that there was in the USA is not linked to precise facts
but reflects the scandalistic interests of certain sectors [of
society]," said Cardinal Herranz.
"The growth of the Catholic Church in the USA did not please everybody
and some people wanted to humiliate the Church in the eyes of public
opinion. And that is not to talk of the huge interests shown in the
cases by lawyers, just like those involved in car crashes."
Perhaps, even now, not everyone in the Vatican has quite understood the
dimensions of the clerical sex abuse phenomenon.
Perhaps some senior clerics would do well to watch the programme when,
belatedly, it is finally aired in Italy on Wednesday next week.
© 2007 The Irish Times
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html
List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
================================================================
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