Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has denied allegations in a television programme that Pope Benedict was responsible for introducing a rule of silence that was imposed on clerical sex abuse victims.
In the BBC Panoramaprogramme, presented by One in Four director Colm O'Gorman, it was claimed that the Pope, while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, introduced a secret directive in 1962 setting out a procedure for dealing with child sex abuse within the Catholic Church.
It said the document, called Crimen Sollicitationis, imposes an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing with the allegation and any witness. Anyone breaking that oath would be excommunicated, the programme said.
"The procedure was intended to protect a priest's reputation until the Church had investigated, but in practice it can offer a blueprint for cover-up," Mr O'Gorman reported. "The man in charge of enforcing it for 20 years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man made Pope last year."
US canon lawyer Fr Tom Doyle told the programme the directive was "indicative of a worldwide policy of absolute secrecy and control of all cases of sexual abuse by the clergy".
Dr Martin today accepted the programme succeeded in showing the "terrible sufferings" that people who were sexually abused as children have gone through and also revealed the "scandal that priests were moved around parishes and they were able to abuse children in succession".
"What the programme didn't do, on the other hand, was actually to show any direct connection between the Pope, or Cardinal Ratzinger, and those particular cases," he told RTÉ.
Dr Martin said his experience was that the Cardinal had actually made a "positive intervention" in the handling of allegations of sexual abuse by introducing a common form of practice for the churches around the world.
The Archbishop also rejected the programme's claim that clerics were sworn to secrecy if they became aware of sex abuse and insisted the Crimen Sollicitationisdid not impose a vow of secrecy about the actual abuse suffered. It was only the "process of investigation" itself that was kept secret, he argued.
"But that didn't block any bishop from personally going to the police or the authorities in the case of somebody who was committing serious crime," he said.
"The sad thing about [the 1962 document] was that it was not really applied and there was a vacuum of norms, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s which lead in fact to greater laxity."