A US clerical sex abuse victims’ group has described the release by the Vatican of files on a priest accused of child molestation as “a desperate, last minute ploy”.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, (Snap) said the Vatican should be releasing records relating to “thousands of child-molesting priests, nuns, bishops and seminarians, promptly”.
The statement came after the Vatican yesterday published internal files about a priest accused of molesting children in Ireland and the US.
The files, published on the Vatican Radio website, were part of documentation the Pope plans to turn over to the US lawyers of a man who says he was abused by the late Fr Andrew Ronan, a teacher at the Servites’ Our Lady of Benburb Priory in Co Tyrone.
The man, known in court papers as John V Doe, is seeking to hold the Vatican liable for the abuse. A federal judge in Portland, Oregon had ordered the Vatican to respond to requests for information from Doe’s lawyers by tomorrow, the first time the Holy See has been forced to turn over documentation in a sex abuse case.
In releasing some of the files yesterday, Vatican attorney Jeffrey Lena said the Vatican’s documentation should help “calm down those people who were too quick to make sensational and unfair comments without taking the time to get an adequate understanding of the facts”.
However a statement issued last night by the outreach director of the victims’ group, Barbara Dorris, said of the release of such documents that the Vatican “should not wait until a court eventually forces it to do so”.
“It’s clear that this is a desperate, last-minute Vatican ploy to seem ever-so-slightly less recalcitrant than it has been for decades with clergy sex crimes and cover- ups,” her statement continued.
“If anyone is tempted to see any kind of ‘silver lining’ in this, it’s important to keep in mind that the highest echelons of the Catholic hierarchy have been fighting this disclosure for nine years,” she said.
Doe’s lawyer Jeff Anderson said in a statement last night that his office had not yet received the court-ordered documents from the Vatican.
The documentation was due to include the 1966 case file including Ronan’s request to be laicised, or removed from the clerical state, after his superiors learned of accusations that he had molested minors in Ireland.
While the Vatican said yesterday that the documentation proved that it had only learned of the accusations against Ronan in 1966, after the abuse against Doe occurred, Mr Anderson said the documents released were only “a partial release of what the court has ordered”.
“The Vatican release makes no mention of existing documents containing knowledge of abuse in Ireland and the United States that Vatican protocols, issued in 1922 and 1962, require to be forwarded to the Holy See.”
Mr Anderson said the absence of the documents in the discovery “would clearly raise more questions and concerns.”
