Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny has launched a blistering attack on the Vatican, accusing it of "dysfunction, disconnection and elitism" in its failure to tackle clerical child sex abuse.
His hard-hitting comments came in a parliamentary debate on a report last week which accused the Roman Catholic Church of failings in its handling of abuse allegations against 19 clerics in the diocese of Cloyne, southern Ireland.
Kenny said that as a practising Catholic, he did not find it easy to be so critical of church authorities, but said the revelations in the Cloyne report were of a "different order" to previous reports detailing abuse.
"Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago," he told the Dail, the lower house of parliament on Wednesday.
"And in doing so, the Cloyne report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, the narcissism, that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.
"The rape and torture of children were downplayed or 'managed' to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and 'reputation'."
MPs were debating a motion which criticised "the Vatican's intervention which contributed to the undermining of the child protection", and so many people wanted to speak that they had to extend the session.
Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi declined to comment on Kenny's remarks.
The Cloyne report was one of the latest of a series of reports which have rocked predominately Catholic Ireland, detailing horrific sex abuse of children and the efforts of Church leaders to cover them up.
The two-year probe into the handling of complaints made in the largely rural diocese of Cloyne between 1996 and 2009 found the authorities' response to be "inadequate and inappropriate", and said this had compounded the victims' pain.
The report was strongly critical of the failures of the former bishop of Cloyne John Magee, who had been private secretary to three successive popes - Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II.
It said Magee, who resigned last year, had "to a certain extent detached himself from the day to day management of child abuse cases".
Kenny said that far from listening to the evidence with compassion and humility, the Vatican's reaction was "calculated" and "withering".
He blasted the influence of the church, saying that "clericalism has rendered some of Ireland's brightest, most privileged and powerful men, either unwilling or unable to address the horrors cited" in landmark recent abuse reports.
And he said "this Roman clericalism must be devastating for good priests ... as they work so hard, to be the keepers of the church's light and goodness within their parishes, communities, the human heart".
"But thankfully for them, and for us, this is not Rome," Kenny said.
Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore raised the report's concerns with papal ambassador Giuseppe Leanza last week, and Kenny said his government would wait to hear the Vatican's reaction.
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