The dressing down came in the unlikeliest of places, a stuffy U.N. conference room before an obscure human rights committee. After decades of fending off accusations that its policies and culture of secrecy had contributed to the global priest sex abuse scandal, the Vatican was called to account.
U.N. experts interrogated the Holy See for eight hours Thursday about the scale of abuse and what it was doing to prevent it, marking the first time the Vatican had been forced to defend its record at length or in public.
The Vatican was compelled to appear before the committee as a signatory to the U.N. Convention for the Rights of the Child, which among other things calls for governments to take all adequate measures to protect children from harm and ensure their interests are placed above all else.
The Holy See was one of the first states to ratify the treaty in 1990. It submitted a first implementation report in 1994 but no progress reports for nearly two decades, until 2012.
By then, the clerical sex abuse scandal had exploded around the globe: Thousands of priests were accused of raping and molesting thousands of children over decades while their bishops moved them from parish to parish rather than report them to police. Critics allege the Holy See, the central government of the 1.2-billion strong Catholic Church, contributed to the problem by encouraging a culture of secrecy.
The Vatican insisted it had little jurisdiction to sanction pedophile priests.
“Priests are not functionaries of the Vatican,” Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s U.N. ambassador in Geneva, told the committee. “Priests are citizens of their own states, and they fall under the jurisdiction of their own country.”
Victims groups, though, called such a defense hollow given the clear directions Vatican officials for decades gave to bishops to not turn their abusing priests in to police and to keep the cases in-house and confidential.
“When they say that these crimes should be prosecuted by states, it seems so disingenuous because we know that the church officials at the state level obstruct those efforts to bring justice,” said Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, or SNAP.
The U.N. committee is made up of independent experts — not other U.N. member states — and will deliver final observations and nonbinding recommendations Feb. 5. The committee has no ability to sanction the Vatican for any shortcomings; the process is aimed at encouraging, and sometimes shaming, treaty signatories into honoring their international commitments.
Perhaps by coincidence, Pope Francis spoke of the shame the church felt for its scandals during his morning homily in the chapel of the Vatican hotel where he lives.
“So many scandals that I do not want to mention individually, but all of us know. … We know where they are!” he said on a day that he met privately with American Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, who according to court documents worked behind the scenes to shield molesting priests.
The committee members seemed to have a firm grasp of the problem and the intricacies of canon law and church procedures for handling cases in-house.
Given the church’s “zero tolerance policy” for abuse, why were there “efforts to cover up and obscure these types of cases?” asked Sara de Jesus Oviedo Fierro, the committee’s main investigator, who was particularly tough in grilling the Vatican delegation.
And the committee asked whether the Vatican would turn over to Dominican authorities its own ambassador to the country, who was accused of sexually abusing teenage boys. Tomasi said the ambassador, who was recalled in secrecy in August, was on trial in Vatican tribunals.
About the Author
