John Allen melder fredag kveld om en nyhet fra Frankrike, om et brev first published by the French Catholic publication Golias, to Bishop Pierre Pican of Bayeux-Lisieux, France, who was eventually sentenced to three months in prison for refusing to report a French priest, Fr. René Bissey, who was convicted in October 2000 for sexual abuse of eleven minor boys between 1989 and 1996.
Castrillón Hoyos’s letter congratulates Pican for not repoting Bissey to the French police and civil authorities. In the version published by Golias, it reads: “I rejoice to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and all the others bishops of the world, preferred prison rather than denouncing one of his sons, a priest.”
Tonight’s Vatican statement suggests that Castrillón Hoyos’s attitude was part of the reason that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, pressed for a more aggressive policy on the removal of predator priests.
“This document is another confirmation of how timely was the unification of the treatment of cases of sexual abuse of minors on the part of members of the clergy under the competence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” said the statement released by the Vatican press office.
The Vatican statement said that move assured “a rigorous and coherent management [of the cases], as in fact happened with the documents approved by the pope [John Paul II] in 2001.” … …
Tonight’s statement is a milestone from the Vatican. Rather than defending Castrillón Hoyos’s September 2001 letter, the statement essentially concedes that it’s an embarrassment, but insists that subsequent action by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Ratzinger amounted to a repudiation of the attitude it implied.
In effect, this is the first time the Vatican has conceced that a senior Vatican official committed an error in judgment on the sexual abuse crisis — albeit one later corrected by the future pope. … …