Trust cannot be taken for granted just because it is on the letterhead. The BBC Trust's handling of a complaint against the "Panorama" television programme "Sex Crimes and the Vatican", transmitted in 2006, will dismay those who had hoped the recently revised arrangements for dealing with complaints would quickly rebuild confidence in the BBC's integrity. The Trust's newly published report reveals that it has dismissed a complaint from a member of the public on grounds that do not stand up to scrutiny. The BBC ought at the very least to look at the matter again.

The "Panorama" allegation was that the Vatican, particularly Pope Benedict when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had imposed strict secrecy backed by the threat of excommunication on anyone who reported a priest for sexual abuse of a child. If true, it was a monstrous cover-up. It would have prevented any investigation of such allegations by the police. The programme's key evidence was a 1962 Vatican document "Crimen Sollicitationis", which was mainly concerned with priestly abuses of the confessional but which could also be applied to allegations of child abuse. The programme alleged that Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, not only left this in force but updated it in 2001, with similar sanctions.

In support of this general charge, "Panorama" cited the findings of an Irish Government inquiry into the shameful record of clerical child abuse in the Diocese of Ferns - almost all of it prior to 2001. But as The Tablet reports today, the Ferns Report says no such thing. The diocese had never heard of the 1962 document. The report said Vatican policy was to leave the investigation of child abuse allegations to the police, not to obstruct them; if necessary its own processes would be suspended so the criminal law could run its course.

The Trust appears not to have made its own inquiries into the truth of the "Panorama" claims because on this point they were not disputed by the complainant, probably because he did not possess a copy of the Ferns Report. But it was dangerous to assume that simply weighing the complainant's case against the programme-makers' would lead to the truth. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor's decision not to make a formal complaint turns out to have been a disservice to the BBC Trust's reputation as well as to the Church, for he would undoubtedly have checked what "Panorama" had said about the Ferns Report against the original. The BBC Trust would then have addressed the real problem: there was no evidence for a "Vatican cover-up conspiracy" masterminded by the present Pope.

It is not just the good name of the Catholic Church but of the BBC and indeed of investigative journalism itself that is ill-served by this failure to get to the heart of the matter. And the Cardinal's alternative approach, writing privately to the Director-General in the hope of improving relations between the Corporation and the Church, would have had no effect at all on the attitude of "Panorama" producers nor indeed on the deliberations of the BBC Trust, from which, as chief executive, he is deliberately insulated.

It would be a mistake nevertheless to assume that the BBC is engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the Catholic Church's good name, but by coincidence, Ofcom has just dismissed a complaint by Opus Dei about the way the BBC drama Waking the Dead portrayed the organisation as sinister, murderous and corrupt. The BBC Trust had reached a similar conclusion to Ofcom: because the plot was clearly fictional, Opus Dei had no case. But is this fair and honest? To invite hatred, ridicule or contempt for an identifiable institution inevitably lowers the reputation of its individual members in the eyes of the general public, who are bound to think there is some truth in what they see. Why did the BBC Trust not see that serious ethical issues - issues of trust, again - were raised by this programme too?

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