BBC VIDEO: Sex Crimes and the Vatican

From Kevin Annett

http://catholicsexabuse.com/


SEX CRIMES and THE VATICAN - 2006 Documentary

[go to link to view trailers of the film]

This BBC video in four parts is excellent. It has subtitles in Italian, but the soundtrack narration is all in English. It connects the current Pope's control over the system for “managing” the priest abuse scandal with the Church's policy of hiding, protecting, and thereby aiding child sex abusers. In a shocking revelation, the BBC discovered that eight American sex fugitives are living in Rome near the Vatican, on the Church's tab! There are interview with victims of priest abuse, their family members, and a former Church lawyer who “changed sides.” An Arizona prosecutor who put eight cassocked pedophiles in prison, former Phoenix DA Rick Romley, states in Part 4 of the video:


The secrecy, the obstruction that I saw during my investigation was unparallelled in my entire career here as a prosecutor 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 show that that meeting had even occurred. You know, when we started looking at it, it was really interesting. We came across in the Canons for the Church there are supposed to be secret archives where this information is to be kept, and not given to the civil authorities, no matter what the circumstances. There was an instruction from the Nunzio, because of his ambassador status, to shift all of this incriminating information to him, because under the law we could not subpoena that information from him, because of his ambassador status. I think that is really the story — the Church's failure to acknowledge such a problem, but not just a passiveness, it was in an openly obstructive way of not allowing civil authorities to stop the abuse within the Church. They fought us every step of the way.