Senior Vatican sources have confirmed that the Holy See is reluctant to see private church documents handed over to civil investigating authorities.
Last weekend, a Vatican spokesman, Padre Ciro Benedettinni, said that while the situation differed from country to country, the Vatican was generally unhappy about private church documents being released to civil authorities.
Senior Vatican figures said yesterday that while the Catholic Church urged bishops to co-operate fully with civil authorities, especially in relation to sex-abuse cases, there was no Vatican provision recommending that private church documents be released.
In practice, the level and extent of co-operation with civil authorities must be decided by the local bishops' conference in the light of existing church-state relations in any given country.
In the 1980s, the Vatican invoked its own territorial independence when refusing to hand over US Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, former head of the Vatican Bank IOR. Archbishop Marcinkus had been wanted by Italian magistrates who wished to press charges of fraudulent bankruptcy following the 1981 downfall of the Banco Ambrosiano.
When the Vatican last year issued an internal document, offering senior clergy guidelines on how to handle cases of sexual abuse, the question of co-operation with civil authorities was ignored.
The thrust of On More Grave Delicts Reserved to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith concerned internal procedures with the Vatican requiring bishops both to initiate their own investigation and to inform the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith immediately if and when a suspected case of child abuse arose.
Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, of Colombia, prefect of the Congregation of the Clergy, said the "guidelines" had been drawn up to standardise the church's disciplinary reaction in Rome and at local level.
The Grave Delicts document puts the emphasis on church disciplinary procedures, calling for sexual abuse cases to be handled by ecclesiastical courts while also expressing concern for a "series of grave crimes against the Holiness of the Sacraments".
A spokeswoman for the Catholic Communications Office in Maynooth has said the Vatican did not know of any basis for a newspaper report yesterday which claimed a senior source in Rome had said "we do not believe church files should be handed over". The report quoted the "senior official" as saying that "the Vatican explicitly objects to the handover of all the crucial diocesan files that would give any inquiry a chance of success."
The spokeswoman referred to a statement issued by the Catholic Communications Office in January in response to disclosures that Rome had sent a letter to all bishops in May 2001 concerning the conduct of internal investigations and discipline where clerical child sex abusers were concerned.
The Maynooth statement emphasised that the Rome letter did not alter the Irish bishops' policy on reporting complaints about clerical child sex abuse to the civil authorities here.