Ireland blasts 'disgraceful' Vatican over sex abuse case

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny lashed out Thursday at the "absolutely disgraceful" role of the Roman Catholic Church in a clerical sex abuse scandal, as Dublin called in the Vatican ambassador. Kenny's comments came a day after an Irish government probe into the handling of the child sex abuse against 19 clerics in the diocese of Cloyne, southern Ireland, strongly criticised the Vatican's response. "I think that this is absolutely disgraceful, that the Vatican took the view that it did in respect of something that is as sensitive and as personal with such long-lasting difficulties for persons involved," Kenny told RTE state radio. Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore meanwhile met papal ambassador Giuseppe Leanza and rebuked him over the the Vatican's "unacceptable" behaviour in the case. The Irish government "considered it unacceptable that the Vatican intervention may have led priests to believe that they could, in conscience, evade their responsibilities," Gilmore said he told the envoy. These responsibilities "could have protected innocent children from sexual abuse", he told the envoy. Leanza said he would hand the report on the Cloyne scandal to the Vatican. "Naturally I am very distressed myself that there have again been failures in assuring the protection of children in the Church despite all the good work that has been done," Leanza said. The two-year probe into the handling of complaints made between 1996 and 2009 in the largely rural diocese of Cloyne in southern Ireland found the response of the authorities to be "inadequate and inappropriate". It said the 40 victims identified in the investigation had, without exception, felt "that they had been let down by the institutional Church". Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country, has been rocked by a number of landmark reports on child sex abuse stretching back decades, and on Church leaders' complicity in covering it up.