Most pertinently:Re pontifical Secret and Royal Commission:
NB USA ATTORNEY for Vatican in recent high and lower courts re Vatican
viz top USA Vatican Attorney Jeffrey Lena has clarified:
"Lena
said the confidentiality imposed by Crimen did not trump civil law and
was
applied only in formal canonical processes, which bishops had the
discretion to suspend if there was a conflict with reporting laws.
Such was further corroborated by eminent USA canonist[ and by no means a
right wing Vatican lackey],viz Fr Thomas Doyle, that 'CS' was no cover up "smoking gun"."It is important that people - particularly people who have suffered abuse -
know that, contrary to what some plaintiffs' lawyers have consistently
told the media, the canon law did not bar reporting of these crimes to the civil authorities," Lena told the AP
Presently prominently at Royal Commission Fr Doyle is nuanced below:
"Interviewed for a television programme in 2006, canon lawyer Thomas
Doyle described the tight secrecy demanded for the procedure as "an
explicit written policy to cover up cases of child sexual abuse by the
clergy, to punish those who would call attention to these crimes by
churchmen".
However, in the study of the instruction that he revised less than two
years later he stated: "According to the 1922 and 1962 documents,
accusers and witnesses are bound by the secrecy obligation during and
after the process but certainly not prior to the initiation of the
process. There is no basis to assume that the Holy See envisioned this
process to be a substitute for any secular legal process, criminal or
civil. It is also incorrect to assume, as some have unfortunately done,
that these two Vatican documents are proof of a conspiracy to hide
sexually abusive priests or to prevent the disclosure of sexual crimes
committed by clerics to secular authorities." [Wikipedia re "Crimen Solicitationis"
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