UN Issues Damning Report Against The Vatican

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On Wednesday, the United Nations issued a damning report — “unprecedented,” CNN termed it — that detailed the Vatican’s historical and continued opposition to assessing and addressing decades of sex abuse against minors by members of the Roman Catholic Church. While the sex abuse scandal first broke over a decade ago, and avalanches still, the report presented the most pointed criticisms against the network of cover-ups and obfuscation the Vatican has continued to purvey. The report also called for the Vatican to turn over known and suspected abusers who have remained within the church.

“The main finding of the committee was that the Holy See has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by and the impunity of the perpetrators,” Kirsten Sandberg, of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, said in a statement.

As Reuters reports:

In a scathingly blunt report, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child said Church officials had imposed a “code of silence” on clerics and moved abusers from parish to parish “in an attempt to cover up such crimes”. …

The combative exchange sets the scene for the Vatican’s biggest clash with the United Nations since 1994. Then, at a U.N. population conference in Cairo, the Vatican forced the international organization to back down on a proposal to approve abortion as a means of birth control.

One of the most important facets of the report, which notes that the Vatican’s employees have been responsible for the abuse of “tens of thousands” of children, denies that Vatican leaders are responsible for the goings-on solely of the denizens of the city-state in Rome. As it is, as the Pope can stake occasional infallibility, the claim that the Vatican bears no responsibility for the actions of far-flung clergy stands somewhere between self-deception and outright fabrication.

Calling the report “distorted,” “unfair,” and claiming it “interfere[d]” with the Catholic Church’s proceedings, the Vatican offered a concerted pushback against the report. Noting that the U.N. also cited the Church’s backward teachings on contraception and homosexuality, Silvano Tomasi, head of the Vatican delegation to U.N. organizations in Geneva, said that “[t]his committee has not rendered a good service to the United Nations.”

Moreover, Tomasi managed to share that such teachings fall under the rubric of “religious freedom,” putatively believing that a handful of Biblical passages allow for discriminatory, illogical practice to promulgate.

Unfortunately for the church, the report tamps much of the positive press it has gained since Pope Francis’s 2013 election. There may be, however, a bit of hope on the horizon. The results of the social surveys Francis asked to be issued among Catholics following his election have begun to filter in, albeit in limited fashion. Bishops from Germany and Switzerland recently publicized their parishioners’ responses, which sound promising. Strong majorities opposed the church’s teachings on divorce, contraception, and same-sex marriage — with the attendant bishops apparently supporting such beliefs. Indeed, the Swiss bishops even noted that such focus on minutiae is threatening “the church’s very mission.” Whether or not such beliefs will impact church teaching — which remains unchanged under Francis’s tenure — remains to be seen.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/c/embed/7d4f8f16-be51-46f6-8410-9389cd094f35

Image: Screenshot via AP video

Casey Michel is a graduate student at Columbia University, and former Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteer. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and Talking Points Memo, and he has contributed multiple long-form investigations to Minneapolis’s City Pages and the Houston Press. You can follow him on Twitter.