That's essentially what John Allen, the Rome correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, argues in "Avoiding the blame game on abuse." In building his case that Vatican officials should quit pointing fingers at one another, Allen points to a 1997 letter to bishops in Ireland warning them against adopting a mandatory reporting policy concerning clerical sexual abuse, as well as a letter from 1984 to the bishop of Tucson, Arizona, concerning nonsexual misconduct by a priest. There is, he suggests, enough blame to go around, and it does no good to handle each new revelation separately.
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