Vatican City

recedite

Peregrinus wrote: »

but I think what the Tribunal asked the Vatican authorities for, was details of reports to Rome of abuse worldwide not specifically from Ireland...

It was the Murphy Commission I was thinking of actually, and they requested information relating to their remit, specifically child abuse by clergy in the Dublin archdiocese.
As we know, it was the policy of the Bishops and Archbishops to handle such matters internally, and to seek guidance from higher up the chain of command, but not to involve the civil authorities.
Therefore a lot of incriminating evidence relating to the various cover-ups must be stored in the Vatican archives.

I take your point that no sovereign state would feel obliged to entertain an Irish tribunal of Inquiry though. They have no power to prosecute, and all the tribunal statements and admissions of guilt are inadmissible as evidence in a real criminal prosecution. In some ways they are just a way of deflecting public anger, while avoiding a real
trial.

It would be interesting to see an Irish court ask the Vatican for discovery of documents containing information relating to some specific prosecution, just to see how they respond.

Peregrinus

recedite wrote: »

It was the Murphy Commission I was thinking of actually, and they requested information relating to their remit, specifically child abuse by clergy in the Dublin archdiocese.
As we know, it was the policy of the Bishops and Archbishops to handle such matters internally, and to seek guidance from higher up the chain of command, but not to involve the civil authorities.
Therefore a lot of incriminating evidence relating to the various cover-ups must be stored in the Vatican archives.

I stand corrected. Thanks.

Mind you, unless we assume that the Dublin diocesan authorities didn’t keep correspondence files, wouldn’t everything sent by Dublin that could be found in Rome also be found in Dublin? And the church authorities in Dublin don’t enjoy any kind of extraterritoriality or immunity. So if you were chasing that stuff with, you know, warrants and stuff, it really wouldn’t matter whether the Rome end of the correspondence was in the Vatican City State or the Italian Republic; the Dublin end would be in Ireland, and you could get it.

recedite wrote: »

I take your point that no sovereign state would feel obliged to entertain an Irish tribunal of Inquiry though. They have no power to prosecute, and all the tribunal statements and admissions of guilt are inadmissible as evidence in a real criminal prosecution. In some ways they are just a way of deflecting public anger, while avoiding a real
trial.

It would be interesting to see an Irish court ask the Vatican for discovery of documents containing information relating to some specific prosecution, just to see how they respond.

The Vatican would tell the Irish authorities to bugger off, I have no doubt. But if there were no Vatican City State and the church authorities were within the Italian jurisdiction, then the Italian authorities would tell the Irish authorites to bugger off - same outcome. I don’t think there’s any mechanism for enforcing discovery orders internationally.

recedite

Peregrinus wrote: »

unless we assume that the Dublin diocesan authorities didn’t keep correspondence files, wouldn’t everything sent by Dublin that could be found in Rome also be found in Dublin?

I'd imagine that when it comes to sensitive information, the Holy See would instruct the Archbishops not to retain copies, or if they had kept copies, they would have destroyed them or sent them out of the country as the investigations began.
We are talking about people who took out "paedophile insurance"; people well trained in the art of crisis management and damage limitation.

"At the time the Archdiocese took out insurance in 1987, Archbishop Kevin McNamara, Archbishop Dermot Ryan and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid had had, between them, available information on complaints against at least 17 priests operating under the aegis of the Dublin Archdiocese. The taking out of insurance was an act proving knowledge of child sexual abuse as a potential major cost to the Archdiocese and is inconsistent with the view that Archdiocesan officials were still "on a learning curve‟ at a much later date, or were lacking in an appreciation of the phenomenon of clerical child sex abuse.

from wiki

Peregrinus

recedite wrote: »

I'd imagine that when it comes to sensitive information, the Holy See would instruct the Archbishops not to retain copies, or if they had kept copies, they would have destroyed them or sent them out of the country as the investigations began.
We are talking about people who took out "paedophile insurance"; people well trained in the art of crisis management and damage limitation.
from wiki

'
Recedite, haven't you spotted that the evidence you yourself cite refutes what "you'd imagine" the Holy See would have instructed? The Murphy Commission's information about the "complaints against at least 17 priests" came from the Dublin diocesan archives. Clearly, then, the Holy See did not instruct the diocese to destroy or dispose of these records - or, if it did, the diocese ignored the instruction. (And the insurance was taken out in Dublin, not in Rome, so you can't impute sinister Machievellian skills to the Romans on the basis of that decision.)

On a wider note, I think you (and many others) misunderstand the relationship between Rome and the various dioceses. The Catholic church is often presented as a tightly-controlled, centrally-run organisation, with everything micromanaged from Rome. The last bit is not correct; very little is decided, or even considered, in Rome. As regards offending priests, until a bishop is trying to laicise an offending priest - and, as we know, that step generally came very late in the day - it's unlikely that Rome would know of the priest's existence, still less of his offences or the bishop's response to them.

Rome controls the local churches, not by second-guessing everything they do, but by appointing men to run them who are so steeped in a Roman clerical culture that they can be relied up to know what is expected of them, and to do it, without any need to refer very much back to Rome. Rome takes an interest in the things that interest Rome - liberal theologians, for example, or bishops not toeing the line on contraception - and those are the local church issues that take up the time and attention of the (suprisingly small) Roman bureacracy. Otherwise, they have neither the interest nor the resources to micro-manage local churches. Local churches don't submit their accounts to Rome, for example. On something like defending church assets against legal threats or the church's reputation or social standing agains unwelcome publicity, Rome doesn't really involve itself because it doesn't need to; the local men know what to do and they do it. They follow their own instincts. They're in the job because they have the right instincts.

The result is that if you're looking for a documentary "smoking gun" that shows Rome deciding a worldwide let's-deny-and-stonewall policy in relation to sex abuse claims and instructing the world's bishops accordingly, it almost certainly doesn't exist. No such decision was every taken. It didn't need to be. The culture made it unneccessary.

recedite

The kind of documentation I am referring to might transfer some blame from the Irish church to the Vatican. Instructions on how to manage the high profile cases. The policies of moving paedophiles around, and of not informing civil authorities. Do you seriously believe these policies were created simultaneously in various other countries, as some sort of co-incidence, without any input from the Vatican?
There could also be some cases not known to the Murphy Commission. It is conceivable that there might be cases in which the victims have agreed to have all records erased locally. For example, the victims might now be part of the hierarchy.
Since 2001, the Vatican requires each individual case of alleged abuse to be referred to it directly. This is a response to the failure of regional churches to keep a lid on things. It does not square up with the idea that the Vatican have little or no role in managing regional churches.

Peregrinus

recedite wrote: »

The kind of documentation I am referring to might transfer some blame from the Irish church to the Vatican. Instructions on how to manage the high profile cases. The policies of moving paedophiles around, and of not informing civil authorities. Do you seriously believe these policies were created simultaneously in various other countries, as some sort of co-incidence, without any input from the Vatican?

I don’t believe they were “created simultaneously”, with or without input from the Vatican; I believe they were a natural expression of long-establishbed, deeply-rooted and hightly toxic cultures of clericalism and sexual naivety. And I believe they are simply a specific example of how potentially embarrassing clerics were always dealt with since, like, forever.

I could be wrong, of course. But, basically, I make it a rule never to explain by a conspiracy theory that which can be plausibly accounted for without a conspiracy theory. And I think this can.

recedite wrote: »

There could also be some cases not known to the Murphy Commission. It is conceivable that there might be cases in which the victims have agreed to have all records erased locally. For example, the victims might now be part of the hierarchy.

There could, but it’s a bit of a fishing expedition. The chances of there being very much to find in the Roman archives about events in Dublin that couldn’t be found in Dublin were never very high.

And, to be honest, I think that’s reflected in the comparative lack of effort that the Murphy Commission put into its Roman enquiries. They wrote a first letter making rather general enquiries, and were told indirectly that they had gone the wrong way about it; they wrote a second and got no reply; they never wrote a third letter, or sent a reminder, or put out enquiries as to other avenues of approach. My take on this is that they didn’t want to leave that particular stone unturned, just in case turning it over might reveal something, but they never thought the chances that it would reveal something were very great, and there was a limited amount of time and resources they were going to put into following that particular line of enquiry. They were understandably pissed at the off-hand treatment they got, but they never had any reason to think there was some vast cache of incriminating evidence being kept from them.

recedite wrote: »

Since 2001, the Vatican requires each individual case of alleged abuse to be referred to it directly. This is a response to the failure of regional churches to keep a lid on things. It does not square up with the idea that the Vatican have little or no role in managing regional churches.

It squares very neatly with the idea that, until 2001, this was an area that they did leave up to local churches. It’s only when the whole thing turned toxic on them in a very public way that they felt the need to take some kind of ownership of, and control over, the response to abuse allegations.

recedite

Peregrinus wrote: »

They wrote a first letter making rather general enquiries, and were told indirectly that they had gone the wrong way about it; they wrote a second and got no reply; they never wrote a third letter, or sent a reminder, or put out enquiries as to other avenues of approach. My take on this is that they didn’t want to leave that particular stone unturned, just in case turning it over might reveal something, but they never thought the chances that it would reveal something were very great, and there was a limited amount of time and resources they were going to put into following that particular line of enquiry.

Their enquiries met a brick wall. As a result there was some political flak, and in the end the Irish embassy to the Vatican closed, perhaps co-incidentally, or perhaps not. We cannot say what would have been revealed. Nor can we say that a refusal to co-operate means there was nothing there to be revealed. You can say the refusal implies they had nothing to contribute, and I can say it implies they had something to hide. In the end its just speculation, because the Vatican is so expert at covering up.

Regarding the universal RCC policies of moving abusive priests, covering up their activities, holding secret internal investigations without informing civil authorities.....
If the Vatican hierarchy developed or sanctioned these policies, you may see that as too incredible a conspiracy to believe. But the notion that the policies somehow evolved independently everywhere at a local level, without Vatican approval, seems to me to be too much of an amazing coincidence.

68Murph68

Mark Hamill wrote: »

If the Vatican insists on hiding behind some sort of imagined statehood, could we not just declare war on them?
They have trained agents in countries across the world, who attempt to manipulate governments to maximise their own power and who have a documented history of abuse of children everywhere they go.
Leaked documents have shown that the organization has guidelines to baffle police investigations into the abuse, so who's to say that the abuse is not one of their aims of the organisation? A lack of cooperation means we cannot say if these guidelines were made in answer to the abuses or before the abuses begin, in order to maximise their damage.

We should really have used Italia 90 as the opportunity to invade.

The Irish football squad could have taken the pope hostage when they met him to kick things off. A few busloads of undercover Irish soldiers disguised as Irish football supporters on tour having a gawk around the Vatican would do the heavy lifting off the invasion. All they would have to worry about is the Swiss Guard who are only a very small outfit by all accounts. Tell everyone else (especially the Italians, that if they get involved the pope gets kneecapped/possibly whacked) Make it an ultra-fast operation and use misdirection as much as possible (maybe we could have scheduled it the same time as Italy were playing a game)

Seize all the assets of the Vatican (cash, priceless art-works and historical bits and bobs)

A lot of other countries might tut-tut but feck it.

Claim it was a bit of an Irish drunken prank that could out of hand.

Apologise and airlift all the troops (along with cash and other assets) home.

Worse case scenario if anything went wrong we could simply go to confession and the slate would be wiped clean.