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The Great Controversy
Christ and Satan
Conflict of the Ages in the Christian Dispensation"
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Irish abuse victim: New letter proves Vatican cover-up
Amplify’d from worldblog.msnbc.msn.com
A 1997 letter from a Vatican official advising Irish bishops not to report suspected child abuse cases to the police has sent shockwaves across the Catholic world.
To child abuse victims, it’s the “smoking gun” that proves what they have claimed all along: that the Vatican actively tried to prevent criminal investigations against sexually abusive priests by instructing bishops not to report them to the police.
But to the Vatican, it’s just another example of how past mistakes in handling abuse cases have since been corrected.
Damaging evidence
The letter, published by the Irish broadcaster RTE on Monday, revealed that Archbishop Luciano Storero, then the Vatican’s apostolic nuncio to Ireland (the equivalent of a Vatican ambassador), told Irish bishops that the Vatican had doubts about their “mandatory reporting” policy for suspected abusers to civil authorities.The new policy had been introduced by Irish bishops following revelations in the mid-1990s of the abuse of dozens of children. The scandal was so big at the time that it brought down the entire Irish government.
The Vatican letter instructed bishops that abuse allegations and punishments were to be handled within the church through canon law. It warned that bishops who tried to pursue charges outside of canon law could have their actions overturned on appeal in Rome.
The newly revealed document undermines what the Vatican has said for years – that it never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence of suspected crimes from the police. It could be used as crucial evidence in multi-billion dollar lawsuits against archdioceses in the United States and across the world.
Vatican dismisses letter
The Vatican has downplayed the importance of the letter, claiming that it represents an outdated approach to sexual abuse cases and that much has changed since 1997 in the way the Vatican deals with them.“The letter does not in any way suggest that national laws must not be followed. It rightly emphasises (sic.) the importance of always respecting canonical legislation, precisely in order to ensure that guilty parties do not have justified grounds for an appeal and thus producing a result contrary to the one desired,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said in a letter sent to msnbc.com and released on the Vatican Radio web site.
“Finally, it must be stated that the letter was written prior to the norms of 2001 which unified responsibility in this field under the jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a move which has certainly led to clearer guidelines and more effective procedures.”
Victim: letter shows cover-up
But Colm O'Gorman, a survivor of clerical sexual abuse and founder of the Irish charity One-in-Four, said that it’s time the Catholic Church took responsibility for its mishandling of thousands of abuse cases.“It’s just not credible to dismiss the letter because it’s 14 years old. It was 1997, not 1597, and nothing has changed since,” O’Gorman told msnbc.com. “This letter is important for a number of reasons: not only because it shows that the Vatican tried to cover-up abuse cases in Ireland, it also proves that Pope Benedict XVI was dishonest in his handling of the scandal.”
In 2009 a major Irish investigation proved that abuse among clerics in Ireland had been “endemic” for decades. As a result of the landmark investigation, Benedict accepted the resignation of some bishops and ordered an investigation into seminars and dioceses.
O’Gorman claims that the letter proves that the bishops weren’t to blame – but rather the Vatican.“The pope said that the Church of Ireland failed to do their duty, but it turns out it was the Vatican that prevented them from doing the right thing. The Vatican is a state, and the pope is its head. As such, he needs to take responsibility for the church’s failures over the abuses,” said O’Gorman.
Pope Benedict implicated?
The newly revealed letter once again calls in to question the role of Pope Benedict in the alleged cover-up of the sexual abuse scandal.Before being elected pope in 2005, Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was in charge of the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for 24 years.
In 2001, he took over control of all investigations into claims of sexual abuse by the clergy. As a conservative theologian, he enforced the procedure set by canon law, which requires bishops to report all case of clerical sexual abuse of minors to the congregation.
While the Vatican has always maintained that Benedict introduced a more open and efficient system in the way the church deals with abuse cases, critics claim that many priests suspected of sexual abuse were simply moved to different parishes where they continued their abuse – even during his rule.
Geoffrey Robertson, a human rights lawyer based in London and author of "The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse” believes the letter proves Benedict’s complicity.
“This letter reveals a policy that was decided by the Vatican when Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office in charge of disciplining priests worldwide. He insisted that canon law was to prevail over civil authorities,” Robertson said in a phone interview Wednesday. “The Vatican line of defense that this was an opinion of an archbishop like Storero, who was out of touch with the times, is nonsense. Ratzinger was head of the congregation since 1981, and all big decisions had to go through him”
Robertson believes the letter could be extremely damaging in a court of law. “I think that in terms of suing the Vatican for negligence in cases where there is no remedy against the local church, this letter will be useful as evidence of the Vatican’s policy. It might have been directed to Ireland but it applies throughout the world.”
One way or the other, O’Gorman still wants to see some justice for the victims of abuse.“They need to come to terms with what they have done,” O’Gorman said. “They need to understand the scale of their negligent behavior on countless lives. It’s disingenuous and immoral.”
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A Vatican smoking gun?
Amplify’d from www.getreligion.org
Posted by Mollie
Irish broadcaster RTE and the Associated Press broke news this week regarding a two-page 1997 letter from the Vatican’s diplomat in Ireland at the time, Archbishop Luciano Storero. From there, the story traveled quickly. The letter communicates the opinion of the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy about a set of proposed Irish policies for how to deal with priestly sexual abuse.
While a careful read of the letter might yield any number of responses, the media coverage has missed the mark. By no means is this the only example, but let’s just look at the New York Times piece “Vatican Warned Bishops Not to Report Child Abuse.” We’ll discuss the inaccurate headline in a moment, but first the lede:
A newly disclosed document reveals that Vatican officials instructed the bishops of Ireland in 1997 that they must not adopt a policy of reporting priests suspected of child abuse to the police or civil authorities.
The document appears to contradict Vatican claims that the hierarchy in Rome never determined the actions of local bishops in abuse cases, and that the church did not impede criminal investigations of accused child abusers.
The headline is, alas, completely inaccurate. Nowhere in the letter did the Vatican warn bishops not to report child abuse. Note there’s a difference between the headline and the first paragraph. The policy in question proposed mandatory reporting for any claim of abuse, substantiated or otherwise. Storero said that the congregation had serious concerns about that policy.
Even so, that was not the main point of the brief letter. The main point was that the Irish bishops needed to make sure that their policy was in line with canon law lest convictions get overturned on technicalities. I’ll let John Allen at the National Catholic Reporter explain his take on why this letter — whatever else you might say about it — is not how it’s being portrayed by some advocates:
First, the letter warns the Irish bishops that if they were to adopt policies which violate the church’s Code of Canon Law, cases in which they remove abusers from the priesthood could be overturned on procedural grounds. Were that to happen, the letter says, “the results could be highly embarrassing and detrimental.”
In other words, a main concern of the letter is to ensure that when a bishop takes action against an abuser, his edict should stick — suggesting a fairly tough line on abuse, rather than a drive to cover it up.
Second, the letter does not directly forbid bishops from reporting abusers to police and prosecutors. Instead, it communicates the judgment of one Vatican office that mandatory reporting policies raise concerns. It’s not a policy directive, in other words, but an expression of opinion.
So the headline is just completely in error and the language throughout the story also suffers from this misunderstanding, it seems. The opinion of one Vatican official that mandatory reporting policies raise concerns is different than the Vatican forbidding or dictating to the bishops in anything.
Here’s how the Times characterizes some of this:
It said that for both “moral and canonical” reasons, the bishops must handle all accusations through internal church channels. Bishops who disobeyed, the letter said, may face repercussions when their abuse cases were heard in Rome.
“The results could be highly embarrassing and detrimental to those same Diocesan authorities,” the letter said.
Just … no. In addition to making this seem like the letter is saying that all claims of sexual abuse must be handled exclusively in church channels, the language throughout is imprecise. The only “repercussions” mentioned in the letter are that failure to adhere to canonical law could mean a bishop’s discipline of a priest could be overturned. There’s nothing about obeying anything other than canon law — and that for the purpose of carrying out justice against perpetrators of crimes. It doesn’t quite match with the “smoking gun” rhetoric employed in many journalistic write-ups of the piece, but that’s what the letter says. (Interested readers might also check out Jimmy Akin’s thorough take on this over at the National Catholic Register.)
And as for the “moral and canonical” bit, the actual text from the letter is:
In particular, the situation of ‘mandatory reporting’ gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature.
Immediately this suggests something like problems with respecting the seal of the confessional, right? The letter provides no details, but that’s what immediately comes to mind when you think of how sexual abuse comes to light. Or there are many cases when abuse is reported on condition of anonymity. Now, perhaps a church still might want to adopt a mandatory reporting policy for a certain level of substantiation — but these are concerns that should be explained rather than distorted.
Allen gives a third reason for why he believes the “smoking gun” angle taken by reporters is overblown. He basically says it can’t be a smoking gun because the Congregation for Clergy at that time was under the direction of Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos and his dislike of reporting priests to civil authorities has been well documented. And while this won’t jive with the Times oft-discussed attempts to make Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (aka Pope Benedict XVI) the bad guy in all of this, Hoyos and Ratzinger were at opposing sides on how to handle sex abuse cases. Ratzinger eventually won out. Or, as Allen puts it:
In that light, the 1997 letter seems less a statement of Vatican policy than an expression of what would eventually be the losing side in an internal Vatican power struggle.
Yes, all of this requires some complex understanding — from Vatican power struggles to the importance of the confessional seal — but it’s certainly not an insurmountable barrier.
Addendum: After writing this, I just noted that the online version of the Times story has been updated. The headline has been changed to “Vatican Letter Warned Bishops on Abuse Policy.” That is a wonderful change to an accurate headline.
The first part of the lede has also been changed, also for the better. It now says that the document reveals that Vatican officials spoke of their serious reservations about mandatory reporting. The new version also removes that confusing language about abuse cases being handled exclusively in church courts and explains that the “moral and canonical” concerns deal with the mandatory reporting. In fact, this updated version is just much better at explaining all of these details. If you want to see the older version of the story, I found it here.
Kudos to the New York Times for updating the story to be more accurate and informative. And if you’re looking for existing examples of some of the mistakes noted above, it looks like the Associated Press is the outlet that really got the inaccuracy ball rolling here in this report on the letter and its meaning.
Image via Flickr stream of Michele Hubacek aka the Choctopus.
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Profile: US ambassador seeks to 'build bridges' with Vatican (Babylon)
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Ambassador Miguel Diaz speaks with CNA at his home on Jan. 19
Rome, Italy, Jan 20, 2011 / 04:37 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- America’s ambassador to the Holy See says the two sides are working to rebuild trust following the leak of alleged diplomatic cables that caused embarrassment late last year.
“What brings us together is far, far, far more than what sets us apart, and I want to focus on that," Ambassador Miguel H. Diaz told CNA in a wide-ranging interview at his hilltop residence in Rome Jan. 19.
Ambassador Diaz said that during his 16 months in Rome he has seen “significant signs that show the ongoing commitment of this President, the White House, and our government in general to fostering and deepening this relationship.”
He said the scandal of the alleged U.S. diplomatic cables, released on the website WikiLeaks has not affected the Vatican-U.S. working relationship.
According to an analysis by CNA, more than 700 cables from the U.S. embassy to the Vatican were among the 250,000 State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks.
To date, only a handful of them has been released. But some of those have proven embarrassing, including one in which a U.S. embassy staffer poked fun at the “poor communications culture” in the Vatican and another in which Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone was described as “yes man.”
The WikiLeaks affair has been a bump in the road in an otherwise easy and low-key relationship between the Vatican and the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, during his first two years in office.
Ambassador Diaz is credited with running a smooth diplomatic operation — especially considering that prior to this he has had no previous diplomatic experience.
The 47-year old Cuban-American was a professor of theology at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University in Minnesota when the call came from the White House in May 2009, five months after President Obama was inaugurated.
Reportedly, he was not first on the list for the position. However, the president’s top choices had to be rejected because they favored abortion or embryonic stem cell research — positions that would have made their appointment appear to be a snub to the Vatican.
The U.S. Senate confirmed Ambassador Diaz in August 2009, and since then he and his wife, also a theology professor, have been living with their four children in the ambassador's residence atop Rome’s Janiculum Hill.
When Pope Benedict XVI received Ambassador Diaz for the first time to accept his credentials, he did so warmly. But he made a point of emphasizing the Church’s differences with the U.S. administration.
“I think particularly of the need for a clear discernment with regard to issues touching the protection of human dignity and respect for the inalienable right to life from the moment of conception to natural death, as well as the protection of the right to conscientious objection on the part of health care workers, and indeed all citizens,” the Pope told the new ambassador.
Despite broad disagreements on basic policies, Ambassador Diaz said he is focusing on the values and the interests the two sides share.
"I think it's important to recognize that there are differences,” he said. “But I think it's important not to be paralyzed by those differences. The things that we have in common far exceed the things that divide us," said Ambassador Diaz.
As the ninth U.S. ambassador, Diaz said he is really "standing on the shoulders" of the "giants" that have gone before him.
Unofficial relations between the two states go back to the birth of America, when President George Washington assured Pope Pius VI that the Pope would have full freedom to appoint bishops in the new land.
It would take until President Ronald Reagan in 1984 for the U.S. to establish its first official embassy here. At that time, it was widely perceived that the U.S. president saw the Vatican and then-Pope John Paul II as an important ally in the fight against communism.
The embassy recently celebrated its 27th anniversary. Ambassador Diaz has as a staff of 19 — a formidable presence for promoting U.S. foreign policy at the world's smallest state.
"The size is really inversely proportional to the scope of influence," said Ambassador Diaz. “You can't just think of the Holy See as boxed with the Vatican City walls. We have to think of it as this vast network."
Since his Senate confirmation hearings, Ambassador Diaz has spoken of his vision for the embassy as one of “building bridges.”
And he has pursued that strategy during his 16-month tenure. He has worked diligently to build relationships not only with Vatican officials, but also with the wider institutions of the universal Church — pontifical universities, religious communities, even hospitals, non-profits and humanitarian agencies.
The embassy has sponsored several high-profile meetings to highlight areas of mutual interest.
An embassy-sponsored conference in 2009 brought professionals to the city to raise awareness of the need to stop mother-child transmission of AIDS. The embassy co-sponsored a concert with the Church aid agency Caritas to raise money for Haitian earthquake victims.
An embassy-sponsored conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University last October encouraged members of different faith traditions to come together in "building bridges." At the event, the director of the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Joshua DuBois, gave the keynote address.
But Ambassador Diaz said much of his diplomatic work is done in one-on-one conversations — what he called "diplomacy at the table" during luncheons and dinners, and "targeted diplomacy" with Vatican contacts through more formal channels.
The issues of concern to the U.S. and the Vatican are broad and far-reaching.
"One of the greatest challenges,” he said, was how the “human family” is going to “reconcile” its “incredible diversity” of religions and cultures. This diversity, he said, “increasingly threatens to tear us apart.”
On that note, Ambassador Diaz called Pope Benedict’s annual speech to diplomats Jan. 10 “ambitious.”
The Pope used strong language to condemn religious discrimination and persecution around globe, especially in the Middle East, North Africa and China.
"The task of building bridges is essential if we are to bring about reconciliation and peace, and if we are going to tackle ongoing problems such as the trafficking of persons and basic violations of human dignity — including violations for persons to exercise a right to religious freedom," Ambassador Diaz said.
He sees a "bridge-building" opportunity in Pope Benedict's call for world religious leaders to gather in Assisi next October to pray for peace. It is fitting that such an encounter should take place in the birthplace of St. Francis, whose name is associated with peace and reconciliation.
In an "interconnected" world, St. Francis’ message that all things are tied together is important, Ambassador Diaz said. The day of prayer called by the Pope has the potential to "do what religion is intended to do — bring people together and not drive them apart."
"In this interdependent world, civic leaders cannot act alone, no nation can act alone, and the contribution of religious leaders is essential in the building of peace, the defending of human dignity, the fight against any type of abuse. And certainly the religious leaders have a central role to play in that outgoing, noble task," Ambassador Diaz said.
He identified ending human trafficking and promoting education and migration issues as the embassy's top priorities.
"There are so many different areas that wherever the dignity of the human person is violated, that persons … and organizations associated with the Church can help," he explained.
"I think that's where the effective work of building those bridges and defending that dignity would come in, the day-to-day exercise of this relationship."
He does not downplay the continued differences between the U.S. and the Holy See on issues such as abortion, embryonic stem cell research, the homosexual lifestyle, and the promotion of condoms for AIDS prevention.
No diplomatic relationship finds both sides seeing eye-to-eye on every issue, Ambassador Diaz noted. "That's the ideal, the ideal will never be there."
He prefers to concentrate on his responsibility as President Obama's personal representative to the Holy See.
"As a person of integrity, I would not be sitting here if I did not believe that there was a significant convergence in my ability to carry out this duty here at the Holy See,” he said. “I'm defending the dignity of human persons in different ways. I am building bridges. And these are fundamental tenets of this administration and fundamental tenets of who I am as a person.”
He would like his time as ambassador to be remembered as one in which U.S. foreign policy and the common interests of the Holy See were united "to advance the common good of the human family."
"If I can do that, even if it's just in little ways, during my tenure here, then I'll call it a success,” he said. “I'll be happy that I did my job, which is to answer the call — certainly of President Obama and of my country, to serve it — and also the call of the human family and the Church to advance the common good."
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Sex abuse scandals line John Paul's road to sainthood
Amplify’d from www.ibtimes.com
Sex abuse scandals line John Paul's road to sainthood
The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church is embroiled, once again, in a sexual abuse scandal or, more properly speaking, another aspect of the same sexual abuse scandal that has haunted the Church for over 20 years.
REUTERS
Pope John Paul II blesses Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, during a special audience in Paul VI hall at the Vatican November 30, 2004. The Legionaries of Christ, a conservative Roman Catholic order that once had absolute and high-level Vatican support, has been disgraced by revelations its charismatic Mexican founder, Maciel, led a double life that included abusing young boys and fathering children.
It has come to light, in the ongoing investigations and litigations of sexual abuses by Irish clergy, that the Irish bishops took part in a cover-up of the abusers specifically because of instructions from the Vatican contained in a 1997 letter, made public this week.
The Pope in 1997 was the widely popular and beloved John Paul II, who is currently being fast-tracked by the current pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, for sainthood.
Some Catholics are calling for a halt to that process, at least until all the information is made public about what role John Paul II played, not only in the letter to the Irish clergy, but in other cover-ups of predatory priests around the world.
"It is clear to an objective bystander that John Paul II was the leader of the Vatican's cover-up of sexual abuse by clergy," said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org. "The facts that have come to light should absolutely delay the current effort to canonize him."
But in 1997, the Irish bishops received a letter from the Congregation for the Clergy - in other words, the Roman Curia which is, together with the Pope, the governing body of the Catholic Church.
The letter, stamped "Strictly confidential," remained so until an Irish bishop handed a copy to a reporter earlier this week.
The letter referred to the Irish bishops' document and said it contains "procedures and dispositions which appear contrary to canonical discipline and which, if applied, could invalidate the acts of the same Bishops who are attempting to put a stop to these problems."
Advocacy groups for victims of sexual abuse by clergy immediately called the letter a "smoking gun," revealing that Vatican denials over the years that it never instructed bishops to cover up were false.
Church officials and supporters at once responded that the letter was in no way telling Irish bishops not to cooperate with civil authorities.
Jeffrey Lena, the Vatican's U.S. lawyer, said the letter had been "deeply misunderstood" by the media. Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said the Holy See sent the letter because it wanted to make certain that pedophile priests would not escape punishment by the Church due to a technicality of a bishop or priest breaking the confidentiality of the confessional.
But victims groups pointed out that the vast majority of sexual abuse cases did not involve the confessional. Other priests, bishops and civilian authorities almost always learned of sexual abuse incidents outside the confessional from the victims or the victims' parents. Irish bishops have also told civilian authorities that the letter from the Vatican caused them to stop cooperating with civil investigations.
"When you are familiar, as I am, with how the Vatican words things, there is no doubt what the letter meant. It basically says, 'Don't turn these priests in,'" said Thomas Doyle, a Roman Catholic priest and no relation to Anne Barrett Doyle.
Doyle has been a priest for 40 years and for the last 27 years has been working on the sexual abuse and cover-up issues. He warned high-ranking Church officials in 1985 of the enormity of the problem and the consequences of not addressing it. He was ignored.
"When the sexual abuse scandal started coming to the surface in 1985 in a case in Louisiana, the Vatican was alerted," Doyle said. "I know because I saw the letters. The Vatican did nothing."
Doyle said the pattern was repeated for the next decade and beyond.
"The Pope received notices from bishops and others of the situation, of the abuses and the cover-ups, and he did not respond. He did not even acknowledge the letters," Doyle said.
Doyle said that Pope John Paul II stopped the Vatican investigation into the actions of Marcial Maciel, the Mexican priest who founded the Legion of Christ and has been proven to be a bigamist and a dope fiend, as well as a pederast who sexually abused over 100 young seminarians.
Barrett Doyle from BishopAccountability.org said it has also been shown that John Paul II covered up for Hans Groer, the notorious Cardinal of Vienna who eventually was removed from his post for numerous cases of pedophilia.
In 2010, the current Cardinal of Vienna, Christoph Schoenborn, told an Austrian television station that Pope Benedict XVI, in 1995, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger and an advisor to Pope John Paul, wanted a full investigation of Groer. But Curia officials persuaded John Paul II that the case was exaggerated and an inquiry would only cause bad publicity.
Schoenborn said Ratzinger told him that "the other side won," regarding a probe of Groer.
In 1998, Groer was removed from his position, as his egregious behavior became an embarrassment for the Church.
Schoenborn, in 2010, accused the former Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, of blocking the church investigation into Groer's activities. Pope Benedict XVI then publicly chastised Schoenborn for publicly criticizing a church official.
"John Paul knew precisely what was going on and did not address it," Thomas Doyle said. "When the matter came up publicly, he blamed secularism, he blamed the media, he blamed the priests. But he never blamed the bishops or the Vatican. And now they want to make him a saint."
Thomas Doyle has paid a price for being a whistleblower within the Church.
"I'm ostracized. My career in the Catholic Church is long dead. But I would rather do what's right,' he said.
Bill Donahue, president of the New York City-based Catholic League, and a well-known defender of the Church, admitted that the sexual abuse scandal is "a blot on John Paul II's tenure."
"The scandal did not start on his watch," Donahue said, citing a study that said most of the sexual abuse by clergy incidents occurred between 1965 and 1985.
"The Church was a moral failure during those years," Donahue said. "And there is no question that Pope Benedict has done a better job in dealing with the crisis than John Paul."
But while describing John Paul's actions regarding the scandal as "not his proudest moment," Donahue did not think John Paul II's bad marks on that issue "sufficient to block his course to sainthood."
"His achievements far outweigh his failures," Donahue said. "And the momentum is there to make him a saint."
When asked if he would vote for John Paul II's canonization, Donahue begged off, saying he was only a layman.
"I will leave it to the Vatican to make that decision," he said.
Barrett Doyle, on the other hand, was willing to weigh in. Noting that, for sainthood, the Church requires that at least two miracles be attributed to the candidate, she said:
"The second miracle for John Paul II's canonization should be the purification of the Church, and to accomplish that miracle they would have to voluntarily disclose all they know about sexual abuse by the clergy, all the documents, all the names of the abusers and all the bishops and other involved in covering up. That would truly be a miracle and it would clearly show that John Paul II was the leading architect of the cover up," Barrett Doyle said.
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Vatican abuse letter could affect N.L.: lawyer
Amplify’d from www.cbc.ca
Vatican abuse letter could affect N.L.: lawyer
A Vatican letter leaked to the Irish press this week might have an effect on unresolved lawsuits involving sexual abuse by clergy in western Newfoundland, a St. John's lawyer says.
But Greg Stack, who has spent years representing more than 80 clients who suffered child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy and others, said the Vatican's secrecy and unique status pose formidable problems in gaining access to important documents.
The 1997 letter suggested that the Vatican had warned Catholic bishops to not report all suspected child abuse cases to the police.
Stack believes more documents like that could be found inside the Vatican that are relevant to sexual abuse cases in Newfoundland and Labrador, the first province in Canada to see large revelations of abuse by clergy as well as the lay Christian Brothers order.
"I believe there are. That's my belief," Stack told CBC News Thursday.
The arrest of Father Jim Hickey — a priest well known for crusades against pornography — in 1987 triggered a series of other such arrests and was followed by bombshell revelations in 1989 of widespread sexual abuse in the mid-1970s at the Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John's.
A judicial inquiry into the Mount Cashel scandal investigated how two Christian Brothers were relocated to another province in 1975 in return for no criminal charges being laid.
The Winter Commission was appointed in 1989 by the Archdiocese of St. John's to investigate abuse by clergy. Its report detailed how priests were moved from one parish to another after complaints were made about abuse.
Stack noted that the former diocese of St. George's, which was based in Corner Brook and responsible for western and southern Newfoundland, sought bankruptcy protection after it was ordered to pay millions of dollars to the victims of one molesting priest, Kevin Bennett.
Since that diocese no longer exists, Stack said, the Vatican could be the place to take the legal fight.
"The reorganization of the Corner Brook diocese is a factor that has to be looked at when we strategize and try to decide if we're going to go and try to involve the Vatican in those lawsuits," Stack said.
However, he said, suing the Vatican would be complicated because it is considered a sovereign state, and the public does not have open access to its records.
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