One in Four director Colm O'Gorman has rejected Catholic Church accusations that parts of Sunday night's BBC Panorama programme "Sex Crimes and the Vatican", in which he was the reporter, were "false and entirely misleading".
Archbishop of Birmingham Dr Vincent Nichols said yesterday that part of the programme dealing with the Pope 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".
The documentary examined the Vatican's 1962 Crimen Sollicitationis document, which in practice, it said, could offer "a blueprint for cover-up".
On the programme Colm O'Gorman said "the man in charge of enforcing it for 20 years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man made Pope last year".
Last night he said the central thesis of the programme was based on a conclusion of the Ferns Report, published last October and unreservedly accepted by then Apostolic Administrator of Ferns diocese, Bishop Eamonn Walsh.
Page 15 of the Ferns Report observed of Crimen Sollicitationis, "it is of interest to the inquiry as it also specifically dealt with how 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".
Noting the 1962 document did not deal just with the confessional, Colm O'Gorman said other elements in it concerned "external obscene acts with minors" as well as priests and bestiality. "Animals don't go to confession. It's about time the church stopped trying to spin these issues," he said. The Vatican had also ignored three written requests from Panorama to put forward a spokesman for the programme, he said
In a letter to BBC director general Mark Thompson yesterday, the Catholic primate of England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, said the accusations against the Pope were "malicious and untrue".
Yesterday Archbishop Diarmuid Martin agreed that "attempts to use secrecy the wrong way" had taken place where clerical child sex abuse cases were concerned, but that responsibility for this lay "not with the Vatican or the Pope, but at a local level".
The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre said the programme "highlighted, yet again, the enormity and the endemic nature of sex abuse in the Catholic Church".
A spokesman for Ireland's Catholic bishops said that since a document circulated by Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001, directing that all clerical child abuse cases be referred to Rome, five men had been dismissed from the priesthood in Ferns diocese. He could not say how many had been dismissed in the other 25 dioceses.