I congratulate him for not denouncing a priest [pederast] to civil authorities. you have acted well. "I wrote in 2001, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, then prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy in a letter to the bishop of the Diocese of Bayeux-Lysieux French, Bishop Pican, in which he congratulated me for having refused to hand him over to civilian courts to a priest accused of child sexual abuse and have been consequently sentenced to three months in prison.

"I am glad to have a brother in the episcopate, in the eyes of history and all the other bishops of the world, opted for the prison rather than to denounce a priest of his diocese," reads another passage from the letter signed by Castrillon Hoyos, published in the online home of the French daily Golias.

This paper has identified the priest protected by the bishop of Bayex-Lysieux amid the applause of Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos as the Abbe Bissey, a priest sentenced to 18 years in prison for child sexual abuse.

The letter in question is raising a cloud of dust. And not just because it's then chief of the priests Vatican shown openly in favor of covering up pedophile priests. In addition, and last but not least, the letter in question is dated September 8, 2001.

That is four months after the Vatican had issued the document 'delicta graviora', whereby all complaints about religious pedophiles were no longer the responsibility of the local bishops and should be referred to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

The Vatican has recognized implicitly that the letter is authentic. And merely indicated by the mouth of Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, the letter "does not represent the line of the Holy See" and in fact is "the demonstration of how very necessary it was the unification of all cases of sexual abuse sexual abuse in uniform and rigorous competition of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. "