The Catholic Church upset with BBC

LONDON, Oct. 2 (UPI) -- England's Roman Catholic Church is outraged with a BBC documentary, which alleges that the pope covered up child abuse by priests.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor is filing a complaint with BBC1's Director General Mark Thompson, about the "unwarranted" and "deeply prejudiced" documentary, the Telegraph reported.

"Sex Crimes and the Vatican" alleges that in 2001 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, created "a secret Vatican edict" to instruct Catholic bishops to put the interests of the church before the safety of children.

It compared Ratzinger's document to the 1962 Vatican instruction Crimen Sollicitationis -- the Crime of Solicitation -- which, the documentary claimed, laid down the rules for covering up sexual scandal in the church.

The Archbishop of Birmingham, Vincent Nichols, released a statement that said the BBC should be "ashamed of the standard of the journalism used to create this unwarranted attack on Pope Benedict XVI."

Nichols said that the whole driving force behind the documentary was "false and entirely misleading" because it misrepresented the two Vatican documents it was based on.