Do you
remember how you think you look when you abuse?
When you are actually doing the physical sexual act.
Okay, um...
Can you go to that person all over?
That's that person there.
This is Father Oliver O'Grady, a former Catholic priest.
The church knew he was a child abuser.
How about how you would greet that little girl you were grooming?
Just use the name Sally.
Hi Sally, how are you doing?
Come here, I want to give you a hug.
You're a sweetheart, you know that.
Very special to me.
I like you a lot.
Instead of reporting O'Grady, the church hid him from the authorities.
No mistake, but part of a secret church directive.
The man responsible for enforcing it was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Now, Pope Benedict XVI.
County Wexford in Ireland.
The Diocese of Ferns is a strip of towns and villages sprinkled along a rugged
coastline.
Four years ago, this priest, Father Sean Fortune, was at the centre of Ireland's
biggest child abuse inquiry.
The scandal exposed details of a secret Vatican decree which seemed to shelter the
perpetrators and silence the victims of abuse.
Colm O'Gorman was one of its victims.
He returned to his hometown in Ferns to try to come to terms with his past.
When he was 14 years old, Colm was raped by Father Sean Fortune.
On Sunday mornings, after Fortune had abused me, he'd leave me in his bed,
in the bedroom in the house there, and come down and say First Mass.
And I remember that he used to come back after saying First Mass and sometimes
abuse me again.
And then I'd have to go downstairs with him and have breakfast.
And then come down here for the second Mass and sit and watch him say Mass.
The church knew Father Fortune was a paedophile, but failed to inform the
police.
Instead, it moved him from parish to parish.
He was finally exposed and killed himself on the eve of his criminal trial.
Along with the BBC, Colm began investigating who'd been responsible for
helping him evade detection.
It turned out to be the most senior church figure in the diocese, the Bishop of
Ferns, Dr. Brendan Comersky.
We confronted him.
We will survive.
How are you?
I'm fine, thanks.
Sarah MacDonald, BBC.
Sarah, how are you?
I'm very well, thank you.
I've just come to ask you just a question about Sean Fortune.
I'm going to have Mass at half-past.
Why didn't you stop Sean Fortune abusing young boys?
When he was brought to my attention, I moved him out of the parish and sent him
on treatment for two years.
Not for six years you didn't move him out of the parish.
Why didn't you stop him?
Thank you very much.
Why didn't you stop him, Bishop Comersky?
Thank you.
Within weeks of that denial, Bishop Comersky was summoned to Rome.
On Thursday last, I attended my resignation as Bishop of Ferns to Pope
John Paul.
I travelled to Rome later this week in the furtherance of that process.
Bishop Comersky had gone.
But in Ferns, more stories of abuse followed.
Colm is now director of one of Ireland's largest charities supporting victims of
child abuse.
He campaigned for a government inquiry and got it.
In October last year, when the Ferns report was published, it exposed a
cover-up involving more than just one priest.
The Ferns report makes disturbing reading.
It details allegations of the rape and abuse of over 100 girls and boys made
against 26 priests from this small rural diocese.
It says that there was a culture of secrecy and a fear of scandal that led
bishops to place the interests of the Catholic Church ahead of the safety of
children.
The report was the first to link the Church's behaviour to a secret Vatican
decree for dealing with paedophile priests.
The more Colm meets other Ferns victims, the more convinced he's become that the
decree has been used to silence their allegations of abuse.
I'm looking here at the room that I was in 40... nearly 41 years ago.
That's four decades and I'm still remembering what happened inside,
under that roof.
The peace and quiet of a Saturday afternoon in that room, behind that
window.
Aidan Doyle was educated at a Catholic school run by priests.
His terror struck at approximately 3.10pm when he decided to come in and,
as he put it, help me with the practising of my music.
Then a moment later, everything changes.
I was hauled back down onto the bed.
I was told to lie down on the bed with him, on the bed where I was made to grope
his private area.
I was then... I was then mauled, really.
It was, you're going to be intimate with me, you're going to get closer to me,
you're going to be my special person.
I think all my hopes and dreams went then.
It was just a question of when, how, will it ever stop?
After the sexual assault, Aidan ran from the room.
He told another priest what had happened.
But instead of going to the authorities, the priest invoked one of the most
powerful tenets of the Catholic faith, to bar Aidan, or his abuser, from ever
speaking out.
He said to me, I'm going to apply the seal of confession to you, so that you must
never talk about this, and it will be kept secret.
And I remember saying that, that evening, that why should I have to keep quiet about
something that I hadn't initiated?
Aidan didn't know it, but an oath of silence was part of the secret church
decree called Cremon Solicitationis.
The directive was written in 1962, and Catholic bishops worldwide are ordered
to keep it locked away in the church safe.
It instructs them on how to deal with priests who solicit sex from the
confessional.
But it also deals with any obscene external acts with youths of either sex,
child abuse.
Originally written in Latin, it imposes the strictest oath of secrecy on the child
victim, the priest dealing with the allegation, and any witnesses.
Breaking that oath means instant banishment from the Catholic Church,
excommunication.
I was told that, simply told, you don't talk about this again, it's over,
you'll get over it.
It'll fade away in time, it'll go away, you've nothing to worry about.
You know, it's all about forgiveness.
It's all about forgiving your offender as well as the offender forgiving me.
They were judge, jury, and everything else.
I didn't have any opportunity to receive understanding.
There was no understanding brought about.
I didn't know what this meant.
Other than that, I must never talk about it again.
Aidan was so intimidated, he hasn't spoken of what happened for 40 years until now.
His abuser has never been punished.
To uncover the significance of Crimen Solicitationis, Colm goes to meet Father
Tom Doyle, a canon lawyer.
Once a Vatican high flyer, then he criticised the Church's handling of child
abuse and was sacked.
Crimen Solicitationis is indicative of a worldwide policy of absolute secrecy and
control of all cases of sexual abuse by the clergy.
But what you really have here is an explicit written policy to cover up cases
of child sexual abuse by the clergy, to punish those who would call attention
to these crimes by churchmen.
You've got a written policy that says the Vatican will control these situations.
And you also have, I think, clear written evidence of the fact that all they are
concerned about is containing and controlling the problem.
Nowhere in any of these documents does it say anything about helping the victims.
The only thing it does is say that they can impose fear on the victims and punish
the victims for discussing or disclosing what had happened to them.
The procedure was intended to protect a priest's reputation until the Church had
investigated.
But in practice, it can offer a blueprint for cover-ups.
The man in charge of enforcing it for 20 years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
the man made Pope last year.
In 2001, he created the successor to the decree.
In spirit, it was the same, over-arching secrecy with a threat of excommunication.
He sent a copy to every bishop in the world.
But now, he ordered that the Vatican must have what he calls exclusive competence.
In other words, all child abuse allegations must go exclusively to Rome.
It's all controlled by the Vatican, and at the top of the Vatican is the Pope.
So, Joseph Ratzinger was at the middle of this for most of the years that Cremen was
enforced.
He created the successor to Cremen, and now he's the Pope.
This all says that the policy and the systematic approach has not changed.
Cardinal Ratzinger's new decree was a missed opportunity to modernize the
Church's approach, just as its biggest scandal was about to break in America.
Columns travel there to discover whether these were isolated cases sadly
mishandled, or a Vatican policy of cover-up.
At the same time as the scandals were erupting in Ireland in 2002, hundreds of
cases were emerging here in the United States.
A US report tells us that almost four and a half thousand US priests have been
accused of raping or sexually abusing children.
Its epicenter was Boston.
The same stories repeated time and again, the Church quietly shifting accused
priests from parish to parish, allegations of a systematic cover-up.
Column tracks down Patrick Wall, a former Benedictine monk who became the
Vatican-approved enforcer of Cremen solicitationis in his Minnesota diocese.
I was part of the system that was getting chewed up and being used, deceptively,
and it was a real dark night of the soul.
Everything that I had trained for, you know, well over a decade to do,
I found out that I wasn't working for a holy institution, but an institution that
was wholly concentrated on protecting itself.
When a priest was accused of sexual abuse, the abuser was slipped quietly away,
and Father Patrick was moved in.
Most of the cases never saw the light of day, hence we were successful.
That is really the ultimate definition of success for the Church when it comes to a
case of sexual abuse of a minor that no one ever finds out about it.
That it gets shut down, that it's kept quiet.
If a payoff is needed or some kind of a settlement is needed, it's done.
We had a $7 million budget in 1996 to do such things, but the thing that we had to
have was a confidentiality order where it absolutely had to be agreed that
everything was quiet.
And you work with the victims as best you can, but the ultimate desire is to
maintain stability, peace and calm.
And the biggest thing you have to do is absolutely shut down the scandal.
Disillusioned, Father Patrick left the priesthood and joined lawyers acting for
victims.
One of his first cases was against prolific abuser Father Oliver O'Grady,
ordained in Ireland but working in California.
I swear by almighty God that the evidence that I shall give in this deposition will
be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
He gave this deposition last year in a civil lawsuit where he was accused of
sodomising a child over a hundred times.
If the boy was tall or fat, that wouldn't attract me.
I tended to take boys that were rather slim built.
I tended to be attracted to the genital area.
And there was a part of me that would want to be in touch with that or to discover
that, to see that, in this particular boy.
He admits to at least 30 victims, both boys and girls, over two decades.
What about the little girls did you find attractive?
If she had a short dress or something like that I might have been tempted to and
often did maybe raise her dress in a kind of subconscious way or should I say in a
way that she is not aware that I am doing that but checking her out at the same
time.
You get a glimpse of her underwear.
And did you find that arousing?
I did, yes.
The viewing was more attractive actually than the touching in the girl's case.
How about how you would greet the little girl you were grooming?
Just use the name Sally.
Hi Sally, how are you doing?
Come here, I want to give you a hug.
You are a sweetheart, you know that.
Very special to me.
I like you a lot.
She might respond, I like you too.
And that would allow me to give a better hug to you.
O'Grady was jailed for seven years.
He has now been deported and lives in Ireland.
His victims have now set their sights on his Bishop, the Cardinal of Los Angeles,
Roger Mahoney.
He now stands accused of shifting O'Grady from parish to parish to avoid scandal.
Well, the Bishop knew that you had abused in 76, correct?
Yes.
And abused earlier, correct?
Yes.
So, knowing that, would you have appointed yourself a pastor?
No, I would not.
In 2002, the American Catholic Church responded to mounting scandal by setting
up an independent body called the National Review Board.
Its first job was to study the scale of the problem.
One of the interesting pieces that the study found was that it wasn't epidemic in
nature.
It wasn't one diocese found to have more cases than another.
It was endemic, in which from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, the same percentages
of criminal sexual assault against minors occurred in every diocese.
But the Review Board quickly hit problems, with its chairman comparing the Church's
secrecy with that of the Mafia.
Former Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating has resigned as head of a National Review
Board looking into the Catholic Church sex scandal, after serving only one year in
that capacity.
The contentious departure followed Keating's interview with the LA Times,
where he compared some church leaders to La Casa Nostra.
In his resignation letter, Keating said, quote, To resist grand jury subpoenas,
to suppress the names of offending clerics, that is the model of a criminal
organization, not my church.
The Review Board carried on, and drew up a Child Protection Charter for the American
Catholic Church.
Around the Western world, similar allegations were prompting similar
responses.
In Britain, the Catholic Church has introduced a comprehensive regime of Child
Protection Guidelines.
But such national policies have been piecemeal, and the Vatican has no global
Child Protection Charter in relation to abuse by priests.
In America, despite the push for transparency, when media attention shifted
away, the Church continued investigating allegations in secret, marginalizing the
victims.
We haven't seen sufficient evidence to show that we are satisfied with what has
been done, and I think we're not able to trust.
And that's getting reinforced periodically with the watering down of the charter,
the failure of some diocese to remove priests when there's an allegation.
So I think we cannot trust at this point.
We would have thought that the last four years would have taught us enough,
and would have taught the bishops enough to handle the situation.
But we see every week, every month, something new happening that would lead
you to believe that perhaps they didn't learn from the past mistakes.
There's clearly a tension between the rule of law and the rule of the Church,
between child protection and the orders of Cardinal Ratzinger.
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 going to 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 in practice no matter what country you go to.
In some countries, the Catholic Church has little or no child protection procedures.
And, as Colm discovers, the Vatican's sex crime decree is all that fills the vacuum
for some of its most trusting followers.
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?
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 Tarcicio Tatio Sprecico had
been charged with child abuse by police in Sao Paulo.
The priest was first accused of sexual abuse in 1991.
He was moved at least four 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 Paulo.
He has explained since that he felt, or believed, that the priest had been
cured.
But he hadn't.
The abuse continued.
The priest moved three doors away from Donna Elza and her five-year-old grandson,
Wally.
He offered to give Wally guitar lessons.
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 are only five, what are you talking about?
And he said, if I try to tell Mommy 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 Tarcicio.
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 words 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 street, they call him the priest's little wife,
and he feels so angry, so angry that he cries and cries.
He tells me often that he just wants to die.
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 Tarcicio, why did it allow
him to continue working as a priest in close contact with young children?
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 anymore.
He can't handle it.
He's being bullied at school.
They tell him that he's the priest's little girl.
And the church have done nothing.
No therapy, no support, no connection, no outreach, nothing.
I'm fed up to say that it's not OK.
It's not OK.
Despite evidence that the priest had already abused a 13-year-old boy in Sao
Paulo, Dona Elsa claims she was pressured by both the church and the community to
drop the allegations over her 5-year-old grandson.
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.
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.
There's such a great sadness inside us.
I fear my boy will grow with that sadness in his mind.
The boy growing with problems in his mind.
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 is affectionate, calm and is appreciative.
Needy of a father and has no sexual scruples.
My attitudes.
See what the boy is like, then ask the boy to give himself to me as payment for
receiving a present.
Father Tarsissio'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 Tarsissio was jailed for 15 years.
The Catholic Church has 50 million children within its worldwide
congregation.
Vatican has no child protection policy.
The only policy they have is to protect the perpetrators.
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.
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 Ravezzo.
Once the relationship with Rick's family was secure, Father Henn's abuse began.
He used to do these different things, whether it be at 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 move my trunks so that he could put them in the dryer.
And he would take his and put them in the dryer.
And he'd give me a towel, the same for him.
And he told 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 what he was doing.
So my concentration was constantly...
My eyes closed and I would have my hands out because 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.
The man who dealt with his case was Rick Romley.
A high profile district attorney in Phoenix.
Before retiring this year, he convicted eight pedophile 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.
I will tell you that the secrecy, 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 show that that meeting had even occurred.
The Vatican's official line is that its sex crime code is purely for internal use
and not intended to hinder civil investigations.
You know, when we started looking at it, I mean, it was really interesting.
I mean, we came across in the cans for the church that there are supposed to be
secret archives to where this type of material is to be provided and not given
to civil authorities, no matter what the circumstances.
We had information that there was an instruction from the Denuncio,
who is of ambassador status, to ship all of this incriminating type of information
to him.
Because 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 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.
His toughest battle involved Father Hen 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 had written to Cardinal Sedano, who is the Secretary of State,
and I had basically asked him, could he instruct these priests to come
back?
And they just basically returned it.
And they said, the item has 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 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 powerful statement to the world.
To say, everybody is accountable.
To protect our children is important.
And they didn't even open the envelope.
Father Henn, the priest whose outings to the swimming pool with Rick Ravezzo 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.
The most extraordinary thing about this story is that Father Henn isn't alone.
A U.S.
newspaper did a series of investigative reports recently called Runaway Priests,
and it discovered that there are over seven U.S.
priests who face allegations of child sexual abuse, living with the support of
the church here, in and around the Vatican.
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.
Cardinal Ratzinger, now as Pope, could tomorrow get up and say,
here's the policy 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.
The Vatican has failed to respond to repeated requests for an interview about
the cases featured in this film.
Father Joseph Penn has lost his fight against extradition to the U.S.
He's since fled the Salvatorean 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 seven years in an American prison
for child sex abuse.
Despite American psychiatrists labeling him a serial abuser who needed lifelong
monitoring, he was deported to his native island in 2001.
Because he offended in the U.S., O'Grady does not appear on the Irish Sex
Offenders Register, and there are no restrictions on his access to children.
So the abuse and the molestation was almost a full-time avocation during your
entire priesthood?
I would say it was a significant part of the early priesthood.
Of the victims you did molest, what percentage do you think were boys and
what were girls?
I think I'd say three-quarters boys, one-quarter girls.
What else happened to you as a consequence of abusing?
Actually, nothing happened.
Life continued.
Next week, the price of blood.
Panorama investigates David Mills, husband of Cabinet Minister Tessa Jowell.
He's accused of a corrupt relationship with Italy's former Prime Minister,
and a role in a public health scandal involving contaminated human blood.
If you've been affected by any of the issues in this programme and would like to
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