This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/world/europe/un-panel-assails-vatican-over-sex-abuse-by-priests.html

The article has changed 5 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 1 Version 2
U.N. Panel Assails Vatican Over Sexual Abuse by Priests U.N. Panel Assails Vatican Over Sexual Abuse by Priests
(about 7 hours later)
GENEVA — A sharply critical United Nations panel accused the Vatican on Wednesday of putting its reputation and interests above those of children who had been sexually abused by priests. It called on the Vatican to immediately remove all known or suspected molesters from their posts and report them to civil authorities. In a hard-hitting report applauded by victims as a landmark in the Roman Catholic Church’s clerical sex-abuse scandal, a United Nations committee on Wednesday called on the Vatican to remove all child abusers from its ranks, report them to law enforcement and open the church’s archives so that bishops and other officials who concealed crimes could be held accountable.
“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,” said the panel, the Committee on the Rights of the Child. The report, issued by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, is likely to put pressure on Pope Francis to make concrete changes in the way the church handles abuse cases and put some muscle into the commission on abuse that he announced in December, whose members and mission have not yet been specified.
It demanded that the Vatican open its archives to identify abusers and that it hold accountable those who had concealed abuse and knowingly allowed abusers continued contact with children. The Vatican responded on Wednesday that it had already made many of the changes called for in the report, and that the report’s conclusions were out of date.
The panel’s conclusion that the church was more concerned with avoiding scandal than with protecting exploited children mirrored that of numerous other investigative bodies and victims’ advocacy groups. The report, however, was harshly critical of the church’s current practices, not just those of the past. “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,” the report concluded.
The criticism came in the concluding observations of a panel that examined the Vatican’s compliance with the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child. The panel held a hearing last month that was attended by senior Vatican officials, including Bishop Charles J. Scicluna, who was the Vatican’s chief prosecutor of sexual abuse until 2012. The criticism came from a panel that examined the Vatican’s compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international agreement signed by 140 sovereign entities, including the Vatican. The panel held a hearing on the issue last month, the first time the Vatican faced public examination by an international body of its record on sexual abuse, and heard testimony from Bishop Charles J. Scicluna, the Vatican’s chief prosecutor of sexual abuse cases until 2012, who told the panel that “the Holy See gets it.”
Kirsten Sandberg, who led the panel, said at a news conference in Geneva on Wednesday that tens of thousands of children worldwide had suffered abuse at the hands of priests. “We think it is a horrible thing that is being kept silent both by the Holy See itself and in the different local parishes,” she said. The report addressed issues far beyond child sexual abuse, taking the Vatican to task for its opposition to contraception, homosexuality and abortion in cases of child rape and incest. The committee even suggested that the church amend its canon laws to permit abortions for pregnant girls whose lives and health are at risk.
The panel rejected the Vatican’s contention that it was responsible for following the Convention on the Rights of the Child only on the territory of the Vatican City. In ratifying the convention, it was also responsible, as the supreme power of the Catholic Church, for ensuring that it be followed by individuals and institutions placed under its authority, the United Nations experts said. But the Vatican press office said in a statement that it regretted to see the United Nations committee “attempt to interfere” with Catholic teaching and the church’s “exercise of religious freedom.”
While generally critical of Vatican leadership, the report’s authors welcomed as “progressive” Pope Francis’s more welcoming view of homosexuals in the church, but said the Vatican’s past statements had contributed to the stigmatization of gays, lesbians and transgender children and adolescents. The panel also criticized the church’s approach to abortion and contraception. Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a blog post that the report was “weakened” by the panel’s decision to include objections to Catholic teaching on culture war issues.
The panel’s report on the Vatican’s treatment of children was its first in 14 years, but it called on the church to report back in 2017. Although its recommendations are nonbinding, Ms. Sandberg said it expected Pope Francis and the Holy See to act on them. On the many pressing problems related to child welfare, the report recommended specific steps it said the Vatican should take: stop obstructing efforts by victims’ advocates in some countries to extend statutes of limitations, which now allow most abusers to escape prosecution; stop insisting that victims sign confidentiality agreements swearing them to silence as a condition for receiving compensation; help birth parents locate children who were taken from them for adoption out of Catholic institutions like the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland; and identify, count and financially support children fathered by Catholic priests without imposing confidentiality agreements on the mothers.
In a written statement from Rome, the Vatican said it would study the panel’s report, but it expressed regret that some of its conclusions “attempt to interfere with Catholic Church teaching on the dignity of the human person and in the exercise of religious freedom.” The statement apparently was referring to the panel’s comments on matters of church doctrine, such as abortion and contraception. Kirsten Sandberg, the chairwoman of the United Nations panel, said Wednesday at a news conference in Geneva that tens of thousands of children around the world had suffered abuse by priests. “We think it is a horrible thing that is being kept silent both by the Holy See itself and in the different local parishes,” she said.
The panel noted the Vatican’s commitment to upholding the “inviolable” dignity of children, but pointed out that the church had relocated priests who were known child abusers to new parishes in an attempt to hide their crimes, thereby allowing them to remain in contact with children and continue their abuse. In doing so, the Vatican “still places children in many countries at high risk of sexual abuse, as dozens of child sexual offenders are reported to be still in contact with children,” it said. The panel rejected the church’s key contention that the Vatican has no jurisdiction over its bishops and priests around the world, and is responsible for implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child only within the tiny territory of Vatican City. By ratifying the convention, the panel said, the Vatican took responsibility for making sure it was respected by individuals and institutions under the Holy See’s authority around the world.
The hearing last month was the first time the Vatican faced public examination by an international body. At the hearing, Bishop Scicluna said that “the Holy See gets it,” and that certain things “need to be done differently.” He argued, however, that legal action to prosecute abuse cases was the responsibility of civil authorities and not the church. The panel’s report on the Vatican’s treatment of children, its first in 14 years, called on the church to report back on its progress in 2017. Although the panel’s recommendations are not binding, Ms. Sandberg said it expected Pope Francis and the Holy See to act on them.
The panel disputed the assertion that the Vatican had no responsibility to police the church’s ranks. The Holy See assumed full jurisdiction over clerical child sex abuse cases within the church in 1962, the panel noted; in 2001, it assigned such cases to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, a body responsible among other things for upholding discipline. Barbara Dorris of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, who was abused by a priest as a child, said the report was “long overdue.”
Far from cooperating with law enforcement authorities, the panel said in its report, church authorities, “including at the highest levels of the Holy See,” avoided and in some cases explicitly rejected cooperation with them. The Vatican imposed a code of silence on all clergy members, it said, and as a result, cases of abuse have hardly ever been reported to law enforcement authorities by the church. “It is wonderful that the U.N. has spoken so clearly about what the Vatican has done — and what it has failed to do,” said Ms. Dorris, who is based in St. Louis, Mo. “To us, it is a call for the civil authorities to step in. Church officials have proved they cannot police themselves.”
The panel said the Vatican should make it mandatory throughout the church for all cases of sexual abuse and exploitation to be reported to law enforcement authorities. It also recommended that a commission set up by Pope Francis in December should independently investigate all cases of abuse and the church hierarchy’s response to them. But Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the pope’s permanent observer to the United Nations in Geneva, characterized the United Nations report in a radio interview as “a rather negative approach” to steps the Vatican had already taken, and said the report “in some ways is not up-to-date.” He said a Vatican delegation had told the committee about “concrete measures” that were being taken, including the new papal commission.
Katherine Gallagher, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, said in a statement, “The international community is finally holding the Vatican accountable for its role in enabling and perpetuating sexual violence in the church.” Ashley McGuire of The Catholic Association, a lay organization founded to help defend the church in the news media, called the report a “stunning and misguided attack” that “overlooks the fact that the Catholic Church is the leading advocate for women and children and human rights in general around the world,” on issues like sex trafficking and child hunger.
Francis, who became pope last March, has begun a broad overhaul of the Vatican bureaucracy and has established commissions to deal with several delicate issues, including the one announced in December to address clerical sexual abuse. One Vatican official said that commission’s president would be named “within weeks.”
Since 2001, sex abuse cases sent to the Vatican have been handled there by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In an address last week, Francis told members of the Congregation that he was studying a possible link to his new commission, signaling that the commission might become involved in adjudicating abuse cases.
Francis has been widely praised for his humble style and moderating tone on issues like homosexuality, but he has been less outspoken on the abuse issue. He has described clerical sex abuse as the “shame of the church,” but has otherwise rarely spoken about it and has not met in public with abuse victims, unlike his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.
At his general audience on Wednesday, Francis greeted Philomena Lee, the subject of the Oscar-nominated movie “Philomena.” The film portrays her decades-long search for the son taken from her as an unwed mother living in a Catholic institution run by nuns in Ireland. Ms. Lee is on a campaign to get the Irish government to force open adoption records to help reunite birth mothers with their children, and she was seeking the pope’s blessing.