A former seminarian is seeking to bring Pope Benedict XVI before a Texas court to explain what he believes was an attempt to protect priests from the law, writes Caroline O’Doherty.THE US has produced some intriguing courtroom spectacles, as those recovering from addiction to the Michael Jackson trial will testify.

But not even the bizarre goings-on at the playground ranch of an eccentric pop recluse measure up against the legal battle envisaged by Texas-based lawyer Daniel Shea.

Mr Shea wants a district court judge in the Houston Division of the United States Court for the Southern District of Texas to call up the Vatican and tell them she’s putting the Pope on the stand.

Understandably, the Pope is resisting the move but, if Pope Benedict XVI succeeds in claiming diplomatic immunity, Mr Shea will go after the person who grants immunity. It would give him pleasure to see George W Bush take the Bible in his right hand.

Mr Shea insists he isn’t dropping big names for the sake of headlines.

If gamekeepers make the best poachers, then Daniel J Shea was the ideal lawyer to take on the Catholic Church. Third generation Irish Catholic, he is a former seminarian although he has now left the faith and vowed never again to darken a church’s doorway.

He left with a tool that proved the key to his campaign. He read Latin.

“Back in early 2002 I was listening to Cardinal [Bernard] Law in Boston [who has since resigned over sex abuse scandals] saying publicly that he did not know the difference between sin and crime. He was making a distinction between moral wrong and criminal wrong and he said ‘I did not know it [child sex abuse] was a crime’.

“I was nosing around the Vatican website when I saw this document. It grabbed my attention because not only was it only in Latin, which suggests to me it wasn’t intended for a general readership, but the title was Crimen Sollicitationis [Crime of Solicitation] and I thought, hang on, the Church isn’t supposed to understand the concept of crime.”

The document Mr Shea had found was issued in 1962 by the body now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It dealt specifically with the crime against canon law of a priest using the privacy of a confessional to solicit sex.

But it goes on to explore the scenario where such solicitation might give rise to an act of homosexual sex or sex with a child.

Such acts were considered the gravest of offences and were to be subject to the highest degree of secrecy, that of pontifical secret. The status of pontifical secret more usually applies to sensitive internal matters like sanctions against clergy for holding contrary views.

Betraying them carries the threat of excommunication.

Mr Shea read it as a direct order to cover up abuse, but the courts have yet to agree.

Another discovery earlier this year, however, made Mr Shea try again. He found a letter, also in Latin, addressed to bishops in 2001 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now Pope Benedict XVI.

The Ratzinger letter, however, showed Crimen Sollicitationis had not been confined to the archives.

Cardinal Ratzinger added to the 1962 list of offences a number of breaches of canon law which seem comparatively minor.

Holding onto the consecrated host for reasons other than ministering communion, throwing the host away or being too ecumenical in concelebrating Mass were among the additions. “This letter puts child rape on a par with saying a crazy Mass,” says Mr Shea.

Equally disturbing, in Mr Shea’s view, were the directions given on how the Church’s statute of limitations should apply.

Offences such as saying a “crazy Mass” are bound by the secret for 10 years after the offence is committed, but raping a child is protected for 10 years after the child reaches adulthood.

The statute of limitations in civil law varies from state to state in the US, but 10 years is the maximum so by the time a priest would be free to report an incident of child abuse, it would be too late for legal action.

The Church rejects this interpretation. Its lawyers say that, as with Crimen Sollicitationis, the Ratzinger letter did not mention external procedures for handling abuse because its function was to clarify internal procedures.

Mr Shea wants to hear that explanation from the horse’s mouth and says that’s why he has added Pope Benedict as a respondent in the case he is taking against the Church in Houston on behalf of three young men who say they were abused by a former seminarian in 1996 when they were aged 11 to 13.

Lawyers for the Pope responded last month by seeking time to get from the US State Department a declaration that he has immunity from legal proceedings by virtue of being head of the Vatican state.

And if immunity is granted? “We’ll go after them [the State Department and President George Bush] on constitutional grounds.”

Ultimately Mr Shea believes the Church should be made pay for its failures. US dioceses, Portland, Tucson and Spokane have been bankrupted from compensation to victims and Mr Shea says it shouldn’t stop there. He expresses amazement at the indemnity deal signed by the Irish Government which protects the Catholic Church here from losing its wealth and says taxpayers should revolt.

“There are no actions without consequences - the Church taught us that. The consequence for their behaviour is that we could force them into involuntary bankruptcy.”