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U.N. Panel Questions Vatican Officials on Child Sex Abuse U.N. Panel Questions Vatican on Handling of Clergy Sexual Abuse
(about 13 hours later)
GENEVA — In an unusual appearance before a United Nations committee, Vatican officials faced questions on Thursday about the Holy See’s handling of sexual abuse of children by the clergy. GENEVA — The Vatican faced a barrage of pointed questions from a United Nations panel on Thursday about how it has handled decades of reports of clergy sexual abuse, the first such prolonged interrogation by an international body and a moment long awaited by abuse victims in many countries.
The officials, including Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, who served as the Vatican’s chief sex crimes prosecutor for a decade up to 2012, are appearing before the Committee on the Rights of the Child to show how the Vatican is implementing a legally binding convention promoting child rights, which it signed in 1990. Vatican representatives insisted that abuse cases were not primarily the responsibility of the Vatican, but of local dioceses and law enforcement officials with the authority to investigate, prosecute and punish perpetrators. But in their remarks, the Vatican officials said that the church could and should do better to prevent these crimes.
Human rights organizations and groups representing victims of clerical abuse welcomed the hearing as the first occasion the Vatican has had to publicly defend its record. Bishop Charles J. Scicluna, who was the Vatican’s chief prosecutor of sexual abuse until 2012, told the panel: “The Holy See gets it. Let’s not say too late or not, but there are certain things that need to be done differently.”
“It’s a moment that has given hope and encouragement to victims across the globe,” Barbara Blaine, president of the Chicago-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said in Geneva ahead of the hearing. The hearing in Geneva happened on the same day that Pope Francis celebrated morning Mass alongside an American cardinal who was widely disgraced last year in the abuse scandal. At the Mass, Francis delivered a homily about scandal in the church, never mentioning sexual abuse, but speaking of “those failings of priests, bishops, laity.”
Amid the shake-up launched by Pope Francis in the 10 months since he took office, rights groups also saw Thursday’s hearing as an occasion that could shed light on the pontiff’s approach to dealing with the clerical abuse scandal. “But are we ashamed?” Francis said, according to a Vatican Radio transcript. “So many scandals that I do not want to mention individually, but all of us know.”
Pope Francis announced last month the creation of a new committee to tackle clerical abuse but has so far said little on the scandal that rocked the Roman Catholic Church around the world. The United Nations committee in Geneva was looking into the Vatican’s failure to adhere to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls on signers to protect children from harm, including sexual and physical abuse. The committee will issue final observations and recommendations on Feb. 5, but it has no authority to issue sanctions, and its recommendations are nonbinding.
In questions posed by the U.N. committee before the hearing, the Vatican was asked to provide details of cases of sexual abuse committed by clergy that were brought to its attention, to detail measures for ensuring clergy accused of sexual abuse did not remain in contact with children, and to explain what explicit instructions it had given to ensure compulsory reporting of sexual abuse to the competent national authorities together with the cases where instructions had been given not to report abuse. The Center for Constitutional Rights, based in New York and representing victims of abuse, submitted reams of documents and victims’ testimony as evidence that the Vatican had allowed abusers to remain in ministry and shuttled them to different locations without informing law enforcement officials or local parishes.
Written answers from the Vatican emphasized the distinction between the Holy See and the Catholic Church and said that although it encouraged adherence to the principles of the convention globally, it was responsible only for implementing the convention in the territory of the Vatican City State. The committee questioned the Vatican officials about their ambassador to the Dominican Republic, who is being investigated by Dominican prosecutors about accusations that he sexually abused children. The ambassador, Archbishop Josef Wesolowski, was recalled to the Vatican in August, and last week the Vatican denied a request to extradite him to the Dominican Republic.
“It was quite shocking. It was a pretty direct, pretty blunt effort to sidestep the questions,” Pam Spees, an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which is seeking to hold Vatican officials responsible for sexual abuse crimes, said in an interview. Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s representative to the United Nations in Geneva, told the panel that the ambassador’s case would be handled by a Vatican tribunal because he is a citizen of the Vatican, and that the case would get “the severity it deserves.”
Sara de Jesús Oviedo Fierro, the United Nations committee’s vice president, asked the Vatican representatives why, if the church had a policy of “zero tolerance” for abusers, there were “efforts to cover up and obscure these types of cases?”
Bishop Scicluna said: “It is not the policy of the Holy See to encourage cover-ups. This is against the truth.”
The panel questioned Bishop Scicluna persistently about why the Holy See does not make it mandatory for local dioceses to report abuse to civil authorities. Many countries do not require such reporting. “Our guidelines have always said the domestic law of the country needs to be followed,” he said.
Barbara Blaine, the president of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, in Geneva for the hearing, said in a telephone news conference during a break that survivors were grateful to the United Nations committee. “Even if one child is kept safe, all of this will be worth it,” she said. But at the end of the day she said it was “insulting and disingenuous” for Vatican officials to say local courts were responsible for bringing about justice “when it’s church officials who are obstructing justice.”
In Rome, meanwhile, Francis celebrated morning Mass and held a private audience with Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles, who was publicly shamed last year after documents revealed he had a history of protecting priests accused of sexual abuse.
Cardinal Mahony was relieved of his public duties early last year by his successor after the court-ordered release of documents chronicling decades of mishandling people accused of being sexual predators in the Los Angeles archdiocese.
On Wednesday, Cardinal Mahony took to Twitter and his blog to broadcast his delight about his time with the pope. The cardinal wrote that most of their private conversation was about the plight of immigrants and refugees, and what the church can do to help them. But he noted that Francis’ homily during the Mass was about scandal.
Francis preached, “Scandals in the church happen because there is no living relationship with God and his word.”