Rome, August 14, 2005 – The scandal exploded only during the 2003
summer when the US daily Worcester Telegram & Gazette obtained a copy
of a document that for 40 years had been kept as "strictly
confidential" in the secret archives of the Holy See that
describes
the story of a lawyer from Boston, Carmen Durso, who filed a complain
with the Prosecutor Michel J. Sullivan containing a copy of the 1962
Instruction "Crimen Sollicitationis" and asking to verify if,
within
the federal jurisdiction, would have been possible to prosecute the
Vatican hierarchies that he claimed were guilty of deliberately
covering from the US authorities the sexual abuses committed by
members of the clergy.

At the same time, another letter signed by Daniel Shea, a lawyer and
former seminarist who discovered the 1962 document and gave a copy of
it to the Boston daily and to Mr. Durso, reached the desk of the
Prosecutor. The document, said Shea in the letter, is quoted as still
applicable in a note of the epistle "De Delictis Gravioribus" of 18
May 2001 that the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger, delivered to the bishops and other
ordained and members of the ecclesiastic hierarchy.

This episode was brought to the attention of the international public
opinion by the US Television CBSand the Vatican hierarchies replied
by stating that the norms contained in the 1962 document could not be
anymore considered as binding after the entry into force of the 1983
reform of the Codice di Diritto Canonico, despite the fact that the
Ratzinger letter did not support this; in fact, the current Pope
Benedict XVI in such letter not only recalled the instruction
"Crimen
Sollicitationis", but concerning the "crimes under the
jurisdiction
of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" states that
"In the
Tribunals set up upon the ordained or the members of the Catholic
hierarchies only priests can validly carry out the function of judge,
justice promoter, notary and counsel for the defence" and it
restates
that "the trials of this kind are the subject of papal
secret".

Over the last two years the US judiciary has continued the
investigations and since January 2005, a prosecution against Joseph
Ratzinger is taking place at the District Court of Harris County
(Texas).

Mr. Daniel Shea, the lawyer who brought this case before the District
Court of Harris County, will join the demonstration entitled "For
sexual freedom and freedom of conscience, against the causes of the
deviations and sufferings, starting with those of the phedofile
priests and the phedofobic organizations" convened by the
association
anticlericale.net on Tuesday 16 August at 8 p.m. in S. Peter Square,
the exact time of the opening of the World Youth Day in Cologne,
Germany.