Rome Letter:So, who's afraid of Sex Crimes and the Vatican, the BBC Panorama programme on clerical child abuse presented by One In Four director Colm O'Gorman and aired last October?
When the experienced, sometimes controversial, TV journalist Michele Santoro applied for the right to buy the programme (asking price €25,000) for last week's edition of his weekly current affairs programme Annozero on Italian state broadcaster RAI, he found himself at the centre of a major political row.
Mario Landolfi, head of parliament's oversight committee for RAI, called on RAI director-general Claudio Cappon to block the programme, calling it "a media execution squad, ready to open fire on the Vatican". Centrist politician Antonio Satta said the programme was "trash journalism", which "starts with a premise and does everything to prove it despite the way things really were".
When enterprising bloggers put the documentary on the web, L'Avvenire, the newspaper controlled by the Italian Bishops' Conference, accused them of spreading "wicked slander".
Not that such condemnation stopped the programme from becoming the most popular and most-clicked film on Google Video Italia (www.video.google.it).
When Sex Crimes and the Vatican came out last October, it was immediately condemned by senior figures in the Catholic Church in England, with Archbishop of Birmingham Dr Vincent Nichols suggesting that part of the programme dealing with Pope Benedict was false because "it misrepresents two Vatican documents and uses them quite misleadingly in order to connect the horrors of child abuse to the person of the Pope".
One very serious accusation made by the programme is that the Vatican's 1962 document, Crimen Sollicitationis offered a de facto blueprint for a cover-up.
In the 2005 Ferns Report into clerical sex abuse in the diocese of Ferns, mention is made of Crimen Sollicitationis, with the report commenting: "It [Crimen Sollicitationis] is of interest to the inquiry as it also specifically dealt with how the priests who abused children were to be handled and imposed a high degree of secrecy on all church officials involved in such cases.
"The penalty for breach of this secrecy was automatic excommunication. Even witnesses and complainants could be excommunicated if they broke the oath of secrecy."
In the programme, Colm O'Gorman points an accusatory finger at Pope Benedict, saying that "the man in charge of enforcing it [Crimen Sollicitationis] for 20 years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man made Pope last year [April 2005]".
At another moment in Italian political life, perhaps this programme would have provoked less fuss.
At another time, perhaps those willing to criticise it (without first having seen it?) would acknowledge that a programme assessing the pain and sorrow of child sex abuse (clerical or otherwise) had every good reason to be aired.
Yet the fact is that the row about Sex Crimes and the Vatican comes right in the middle of a heated debate about just how much political influence is wielded by the Italian Catholic Church. That row relates to the current plans of the centre-left government led by Romano Prodi to introduce legislation that would grant greater legal rights to unmarried couples, including gay couples.
More than one million people protested in Rome against this proposed legislation, prompting some commentators to suggest that the government is out of touch with the views and feelings of the majority of Italian citizens.
In such a context, some senior Vatican figures see the Sex Crimes and the Vatican programme as part of an anti-Church conspiracy: "People just want to sully the face of the Church and throw mud at the Catholic priesthood.
"This is all old stuff, there's somebody who just wants to stir up a scandal," Spanish cardinal Julian Herranz, president of the Council for Legislative Texts (a Holy See constitutional body), said this week.
In an interview with Rome daily La Repubblica, Cardinal Herranz staunchly defends the Catholic Church's handing of clerical sex abuse cases, denying that the basic policy was merely to move the offending priest to another post: "You have to take it case by case. There has been such a huge media fuss about the whole business. I repeat - you can suspend a suspected priest and move him on. Sometimes moving him on guarantees the freedom of witnesses, sometimes it guarantees the priest himself, making the whole process easier at every level.
"I don't believe that there was less sensitivity to this problem in the past. The fuss that there was in the USA is not linked to precise facts but reflects the scandalistic interests of certain sectors [of society]," said Cardinal Herranz.
"The growth of the Catholic Church in the USA did not please everybody and some people wanted to humiliate the Church in the eyes of public opinion. And that is not to talk of the huge interests shown in the cases by lawyers, just like those involved in car crashes."
Perhaps, even now, not everyone in the Vatican has quite understood the dimensions of the clerical sex abuse phenomenon.
Perhaps some senior clerics would do well to watch the programme when, belatedly, it is finally aired in Italy on Wednesday next week.