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Father TOM DOYLE
Canon Lawyer
There's no policy to help the victims, there's absolutely no policy to help those who are trying to help the victims, and there's an unwritten policy to lie about the existence of the problem. Then, as far as the perpetrators, the priests, when they're discovered, the systemic response has been not to investigate and prosecute, but to move them. To move them from one place to another in a secret way, and not reveal why they're being moved. So there's total disregard for the victims, total disregard for the fact that you're gonna have a whole new crop of victims in the next place. Now this is just... this is not in the United States where this is happening. This is all over the world. You see the same pattern and practice no matter what country you go to.
KENYON: In some countries the Catholic church has little or no child protection procedures, and, as Colm discovers, the Vatican sex crime decree it all but fills the vacuums for some of its most trusting followers.
COLM O'GORMAN
I'm in Brazil, the largest Catholic country on the planet, home to 125 million faithful. It may look like paradise, but scratch beneath the surface and you'll find extreme poverty, illiteracy, sex tourism, and enormous child protection concerns. The Catholic church may have been forced to learn hard lessons in the Western world, but is it applying those lessons here?
KENYON: Six years ago a new priest arrived in the small rural community of Annapolis in Central Brazil. His new congregation didn't know it, but Father Tarcisio Tadeu Spricigo had been charged with child abuse by police in Sao Paolo.
COLM: The priest was first accused of sexual abuse in 1991. He was moved at least 4 times following that first allegation, and continued to abuse in each parish to which he was appointed. He finally ended up here in this tiny, and very, very impoverished community. The Bishop who appointed him to this parish knew that he was facing charges of sexual abuse in Sao Paolo. He has explained since that he felt, or believed, that the priest had been cured. But he hadn't. The abuse continued.
KENYON: The priest moved 3 doors away from Donna Elza and her 5 year old grandson Warley. He offered to give Warley guitar lessons.
ELZA DA SILVA
Early one Sunday morning he woke me up and said: "Granny, I know how to make love". I asked him: "What do you mean? You are so small, you're only 5, what are you talking about?" And he said: "If I try to tell Mummy and Daddy they will beat me, and I'm scared". And I said: "They won't beat you, tell me what has happened." And that's how I learned it was Father Tarcisio. We let the boy take guitar lessons with him because we thought he was in safe hands, with a good person, with a person who speaks the word of God every day in church. I trusted the Father because I have been Catholic all my life, and I never expected that this could have happened. When the kids accost him in the streets they call him "the priests little wife" and he feels so angry, so angry that he cries and cries. He tells me often that he just wants to die.
KENYON: This was during the period when Cardinal Ratzinger instructed all allegations of child abuse to be sent to the Vatican. So if it knew about the criminal charges against Father Tarcisio why did it allow him to continue working as a priest in close contact with young children?
COLM: We may be thousands of miles away from Rome, but this place is directly linked to the Vatican. What gets me is it's the same story every time and every place. Bishops appoint priests, who they know have abused children in the past, to new parishes and new communities, and more abuse happens. This boy was abused in 2002, think about that, 2002, at exactly the same time as the scandals are kicking off in Boston, in the United States, and in Ireland, at exactly the same time that bishops and the Vatican are giving us excuses for why it happened, and for what they're going to do to put it right. At exactly that time this boy is being raped here in Brazil. So now this boy talks about wanting to die, he doesn't want to stay alive any more. He can't handle it, he's being bullied at school. They tell him that he's the "priests little girl." And the church have done nothing. No therapy, no support, no connection, no outreach, nothing! I'm fed up of saying it's not okay. (emotional) It's not okay.
KENYON: Despite evidence that the priest had already abused a 13 year old boy in Sao Paolo, Donna Elza claims she was pressured by both the church and the community to drop the allegations over her 5 year old grandson.
ELZA: The church was angry with me, and people in the church, people in the street were running. They were running away from me. It felt like I was excommunicated from my own community. But I wanted them to believe, like I did, in my grandson.
COLM: That's the thing people don't understand. This family didn't have much, but they had their faith. Now they don't have that.
ELZA: There's such a great sadness inside us. (pause - struggling to retain composure but eyes full of tears) I fear my boy will grow with that sadness in his mind, the boy growing with problems in his mind.
COLM: It looked like the priest might get away with it again, and then this was found. It's his diary. In it he details the kind of child that he targets, and how to abuse them without getting caught. I'll read you a section. Age: 7, 8, 9, 10. Sex: masculine. Social condition: poor. Family condition: preferably a son without a father, only a lonely mother or a sister. Where to look: on the streets, in schools and in families. How to attract them: guitar lessons, choir, altar boy. Very important, ingratiate yourself with the family. Possibilities: a boy who's affectionate, calm, and is appreciative. Needy of a father, and has no sexual scruples. My attitudes: see what the boy's like, then ask the boy to give himself to me as payment for receiving a present.
KENYON: Father Tarcisio's decades of abuse were finally brought to an end. Not because of any action by Cardinal Ratzinger's Vatican office, but by the police. Last year Father Tarcisio was jailed for 15 years. The Catholic church has 50 million children within its world-wide congregation.
Father TOM DOYLE
Canon Lawyer
The Vatican has no child protection policy. The only policy they have is to protect the perpetrators, protect the.. to protect the Vatican, to cover this up, to keep it as deeply buried in secrecy as possible, and to prevent as much damage to the institution as possible. So it's damage control.
KENYON: Cardinal Ratzinger's instruction to send all allegations of child abuse to the Vatican is proving frustrating for police and social workers trying to catch and jail priests suspected of abuse. This is Father Joseph Henn, a choir master. The picture was taken during his first assignment as a young priest in Phoenix, Arizona. It was around the time he met 14 year old altar boy Rick Rivezo.
RICK RIVEZO
My parents knew that I was spending time with him, and we went.. he would come to our house a lot. I remember my father telling me that he had an open door policy with Jo, he can come over any time he wanted. He was part of the family.
KENYON: Once the relationship with Rick's family was secure, Father Henn's abuse began.
RIVEZO: What he would do with us is he would take us out, and we'd go to these different things. Whether it would be a funeral, or a wedding, or that kind of thing. And there were times when he would take us swimming. After swimming we would go into the rectory and he would ask me to.. he would ask me to remove my trunks so that he can put them in the dryer. And he would take his and put them in the dryer. And he'd give me a towel, and same for him. And he'd tell me to lay on the bed. So now he's sitting on me, facing me, and I'm facing up, and he would massage me on my chest. And when he would go down is when he would stroke me, and go back up and down again. And he just did that over and over again. I wouldn't want to look at him, I didn't want to see him, I didn't want to see anything below his stomach. I didn't want to feel anything that he was doing, so my concentration was constantly my eyes closed, and I would have my hands out cos I knew his legs were there and I didn't want to touch them. And I'd just turn my head and close my eyes and put myself somewhere else and wait for him to be done.
KENYON: The man who dealt with his case was Rick Romley, a high profile district attorney in Phoenix. Before retiring this year he convicted 8 paedophile priests in his diocese and, uniquely, forced a written confession from the local bishop admitting that he knowingly hid child sexual abuse from the police.
RICK ROMLEY
Former Phoenix District Attorney
I will tell you that the secrecy, the... I mean the obstruction that I saw during my investigation was unparalleled in my entire career as a DA here in Phoenix Arizona. It was so difficult to obtain any information from the church at all. In fact we knew of certain meetings that had taken place, and yet no documentation was ever produced to be able to, you know, show that that meeting had even occurred.
KENYON: The Vatican's official line is that it's sex crime code is purely for internal use, and not intended to hinder civil investigations.
ROMLEY: You know, when we started looking at it I mean it was really interesting. I mean we came across, in the canons for the church, that there are supposed to be secret archives to where this type of material is to provided and not given to civil authorities no matter what the circumstances. We had information that there is an instruction from the Nuncio, who is Ambassador status, to shift all this, you know, incriminating type of information to him because under our.. under the law we could not subpoena that material because he would have protected status as an Ambassador from the Vatican. I think that that's really what the story is. Is that the church.. the church's failure to acknowledge such a serious problem. But more than that, it is not a passiveness. It is a.. it was an openly obstructive way of not allowing civil authorities to try to stop the abuse within the church. I mean they fought us every step of the way.
KENYON: His toughest battle involved Father Henn and two other priests who fled abroad to escape American prosecutors.
I knew that these priests owed a vow of obedience to Rome, to the Vatican. And so I decided to write Rome and ask them, now that formal charges had been brought, to instruct them to follow their orders and to come back and surrender themselves so that the court system could take the case as we wanted it to. And I've got to tell you, I was very surprised. I'd written to Cardinal Sodano, who is the Secretariat of State, and I basically asked him could he instruct these priests to come back, and they just basically returned it, and they said they item's been returned because the sender has refused to accept the correspondence. They did not even open it, they didn't even acknowledge or give me any type of response. They just refused to accept it. A church with supposedly the moral authority to do what is right had miserably failed, you know, one of the most fundamental things, and that's to stop the abuse of children. And they had a real opportunity here to make a.. I mean to make a powerful statement to the world. To say 'everybody is accountable, to protect our children is important'. And they didn't even open the envelope.
KENYON: Father Henn, the priest whose outings to the swimming pool with Rick Rivezo ended in abuse, is now wanted on 13 molestation charges brought by a grand jury in the United States. But he's no longer there. He's here in Rome, sheltered by the Vatican, and fighting extradition from the headquarters of his religious order, the Salvatorians. The Vatican has not compelled him to return to America to face the charges.
COLM: The most extraordinary thing about this story is that Father Henn isn't alone. A US newspaper did a series of investigative reports recently called 'Runaway Priests', and it discovered that there are over 7 US priests who face allegations of child sexual abuse living with the support of the church here, in and around the Vatican.
KENYON: The Vatican, the moral compass of the Catholic church, may well be holding evidence of other child abusing priests from around the world. But instead of cooperation and transparency, many feel the church's directives create obstruction and cover up in practice. There's one man who has the power to change that.
FR. DOYLE: Cardinal Ratzinger, who now is Pope, could tomorrow get up and say 'here's the policy for throughout the church. Full disclosure to the civil authorities. Absolute isolation and dismissal of any convicted cleric. Complete openness and transparency. Complete openness of all financial situations. Stop all barriers to the legal process. Completely cooperate with the civil authorities everywhere.' He could do that.
KENYON: The Vatican has failed to respond to repeated requests for an interview about the cases featured in this film. Father Joseph Henn has lost his fight against extradition to the US. He's since fled the Salvatorian headquarters in Rome where he was under house arrest, and is believed to be hiding somewhere in Italy. There's an international warrant out for his arrest. Former Catholic priest Oliver O'Grady served 7 years in an American prison for child sex abuse. Despite American psychiatrists labelling him a serial abuser who needed lifelong monitoring he was deported to his native Ireland in 2001. Because he offended in the US O'Grady does not appear on the Irish Sex Offenders' Register, and there are no restrictions on his access to children.
[Court scene]
Q: So the abuse and the molestation was almost a full time avocation during your entire priesthood.
O'GRADY: I would say it was a significant part of the early priesthood.
Q: Of the victims you did molest what percentage do you think were boys, and what were girls?
O'GRADY: I think I'd say three quarters boys, one quarter girls.
Q: What else happened to you as a consequence of abusing?
O'GRADY: Actually nothing happened. Life continued. |
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