Fr Thomas Doyle, OP, met four members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors last month.

The priest emphasised two main points: The need for real accountability on the part of bishops and the need for the Church to be far more committed than it is to the welfare of victims.

He told the panel that priests and bishops who have publicly supported victims "have been punished in some way by Church authorities".

"Those who continue to minister to this issue in various ways remain under suspicion" and are "criticised, slandered and devalued" by other clerics and Church leaders, he said.

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At a briefing 48 hours before the ceremony, papal biographer George Weigel said there was an "information gap" between the United States and the Holy See up to 2002.

"But once he [John Paul] became fully informed in April of that year, he acted decisively to deal with those problems," Weigel added.

Former Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Vallis said that at first the former pope did not understand the "cancer" of clerical sexual abuse.

But addressing this scandal started "very clearly" under John Paul's pontificate, he said.

Critics say that the Pope should have acted against Fr Marcial Maciel, the disgraced founder of the Legionaries of Christ who was found to have been a serial abuser.

John Paul II had praised Maciel and promoted the Legionaries during his time as Pope.

Msgr Slawomir Oder, the postulator of John Paul II's cause, said an investigation had been carried out and found "there was no personal involvement of the Holy Father in this matter".

But Fr Thomas Doyle wrote in the National Catholic Reporter that there was never an information gap between the US and the Holy See on clerical abuse.

Fr Doyle had worked in the Vatican embassy in the US in the 1980s and had first-hand experience of the information transfer on this issue.

"It is hard to believe that this pope, who was supposed to be one of the smartest men alive at the time, could not have understood the gravity of significant numbers of priests raping and violating little children," Fr Doyle said.

John Paul's actions after 2002 were ineffectual, and he was ultimately responsible for short-circuiting the investigation of Marciel, he wrote.

"Perhaps the most egregious nonaction was completely ignoring the pleas of thousands of victims, many of whom wrote directly to him," Fr Doyle charged.

Sources

• The Tablet
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: The Guardian