UN panel takes Vatican to task over cover-up of child sex abuse
Print Edition
The United Nations demanded that the Vatican “immediately remove” all clergy who are known or suspected child abusers and turn them over to civil authorities, in an unprecedented and scathing report yesterday.
Church officials had imposed a “code of silence” on clerics, to prevent them reporting attacks to police, and moved abusers from parish to parish “in an attempt to cover-up such crimes,” the UN’s Child Rights watchdog said.
The Holy See now needed to hand over an archive of evidence about the abuse of tens of thousands of children, and take measures to prevent a repeat of cases such as Ireland’s Magdalene laundries scandal, where girls were forced to work in church-run institutions, it added.
The Vatican responded with a statement saying the Roman Catholic Church would study the report and was committed to “defending and protecting the rights of the child.”
But shortly afterwards, Vatican diplomat Archbishop Silvano Tomasi blasted the report as distorted and unfair, saying it did not take into account changes that the Church had made in the past 10 years or so to protect children.
The exceptionally blunt paper by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child — the global organization’s most far-reaching critique of the Church hierarchy — followed its public grilling of Vatican officials last month.
“The Committee is gravely concerned that the Holy See has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by and the impunity of the perpetrators,” it said.
The report called on the Vatican to “immediately remove all known and suspected child sexual abusers from assignment and refer the matter to the relevant law enforcement authorities.”
Pope Francis has called sexual abuse of children “the shame of the Church” and has vowed to continue procedures put in place by his predecessor Benedict XVI.
The UN said a commission the pontiff created in December should invite outside experts and victims to participate in an investigation of abusers “as well as the conduct of the Catholic hierarchy in dealing with them.”
“Due to a code of silence imposed on all members of the clergy under penalty of excommunication, cases of child sexual abuse have hardly ever been reported to the law enforcement authorities in the countries where such crimes occurred,” the UN body said.
At a public session in Geneva last month, the committee pushed Vatican delegates to reveal the full scope of decades of sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests.
The delegation, answering questions from an international rights panel for the first time since the scandals broke more than two decades ago, denied allegations of a Vatican cover-up and said it had set clear guidelines to protect children from predator priests.
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