I should add, in fairness to the canon lawyers, that the Catholic Bishops Conferences of Ireland, the United States, Great Britain and Australia have wanted mandatory reporting to the police of all allegations of child sexual abuse against clergy, irrespective of the state of civil reporting laws, since 1996. They have been continually rebuffed by the Vatican, the most recent being in 2013 when the CDF advised the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference that Towards Healing 2010, which provided for such mandatory reporting, was fine for everyone else, but Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela (with its pontifical secret) applied to clergy. If those august organisations have not had any success, I can understand why the peers would think that a submission by a bunch of canon lawyers would be useless.