VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
John L. Allen Jr. | Jan. 18, 2014 NCR Today
Rome
We have a new winner in the sweepstakes for shortest shelf-life of any Vatican denial of a news story ever, with the nearly instantaneous retraction Jan. 17 of a statement disputing an Associated Press report that almost 400 priests had been defrocked in 2011/2012 in cases involving sexual abuse.
The denial was issued by Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, at 9:31 pm Rome time last night and retracted at 10:32 pm, which means that it survived barely an hour.
In retrospect, the breakdown seems a classic illustration of the perils of today’s instant news cycles.
The Associated Press moved the story on Jan. 17, basing it on data prepared for the Vatican delegation at a session of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva the day before devoted to exploring the church’s record on child sexual abuse.
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That delegation was composed of Italian Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s representative to the U.N. in Geneva, and Auxiliary Bishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, the Vatican’s former top sex abuse prosecutor. Among other materials, they had a spreadsheet with numbers of abuse cases reported to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in recent years and the dispensation of those cases, which was apparently obtained by the AP.
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