THE US: The Catholic Church in the US has suffered another crippling blow with the publication by a Connecticut newspaper of secret court documents showing New York's Cardinal Edward Egan, allowed priests accused of paedophilia to continue working for years, while bishop of another diocese.
The allegations against the country's most senior Catholic priest could not come at a worse time.
Last week another bishop resigned from a Florida diocese after a long-buried allegation of abuse resurfaced and the diocese of Boston has been reeling from the Father John Geoghan cases amid calls for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law.
Over the weekend, Cardinal Egan's spokesman referred journalists to the office of his old diocese.
Last week, the cardinal, after months of staying largely silent on the issue of abuse by priests, said the Archdiocese of New York would break with long-standing practice and in the future turn over allegations of abuse to law enforcement agencies if the victims agreed. The Hartford Courant on Sunday published details from court papers which were supposed to have been sealed last year after a settlement, with a confidentiality agreement, of a number of cases against the Bridgeport diocese in Connecticut.
They include transcripts of pretrial testimony by Cardinal Egan, internal diocesan memoranda and personnel files. They are said by the newspaper to show that the cardinal, while Bishop of Bridgeport, "failed to investigate aggressively some abuse allegations, did not refer complaints to criminal authorities and, during closed testimony in 1999, suggested that a dozen people who made complaints of rape, molestation and beatings against the same priest may have all been lying". The newspaper says that they show Dr Egan as repeatedly unwilling to believe allegations against priests unless they confessed.
The documents reveal that, in addition to the eight priests originally sued, at least nine others faced molestation accusations but were never publicly identified including one still at work in a local parish.
