A new investigation into the Catholic Church's chronic cover-up of child abuse found Wednesday that a rural diocese and its bishop ignored Irish church rules requiring all suspected molestation cases to be reported to police - and the Vatican encouraged this concealment.
The government, which ordered the probe into 1996-2009 cover-ups in the County Cork diocese of Cloyne, warned its findings suggest that parishes across Ireland could pose a continuing danger to children's welfare today.
Justice Minister Alan Shatter pledged to pass a new law making it an imprisonable crime to withhold knowledge of suspected child abuse as he published the investigation into the Cloyne diocese in southwest Ireland.
Shatter said previous pledges by Irish church leaders to place Irish civil law first and report all abuse cases dating back to 1995 had been "built on sand." He said it was an open question whether other dioceses, 23 of which have yet to be investigated, were still withholding evidence of crimes and posing an ongoing threat to children.
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