National Secular Society
October 2, 2009
http://www.secularism.org.uk/114176.html
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The Catholic Church has been stung into full defence mode after accusations were made about the Vatican’s neglect on the child abuse issue by NSS Executive Director Keith Porteous Wood at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Now the Vatican has issued a rebuttal to the accusations, saying that protestant churches and even Jewish synagogues have even worse records of child abuse than the Catholic Church. It also says that the assaults have been committed by homosexuals, not paedophiles.
The original accusations of neglect and evasion were made by Keith Porteous Wood, speaking on behalf of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). He had alleged, at a meeting of the Human Rights Council that the Vatican had failed to provide the mandatory reports to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child – the reports were now fifteen years overdue. This challenge has resulted in a grudging offer to provide just one paragraph on the abuse by priests – despite it having resulted in the Church paying out billions of dollars in compensation all over the world.
Mr Porteous Wood had also said that the Catholic Church had an appalling record of cover-ups, evasions, moving around of offending priests and making counter accusations of lying against victims who spoke up.
He said: “The Vatican’s record on this is truly shocking. It has shown little remorse for the suffering inflicted on tens of thousands of innocent children over the years. In fact, it has tried very hard to cover up and evade responsibility. We have called on the international community to stop pussy-footing around the Vatican and to hold it to account for the misery it has been complicity in inflicting. We want the Vatican to be made to face up to its responsibility and accept its culpability.”
Mr Wood said that the Vatican compounded the distress of victims by constantly trying to belittle their suffering or to evade responsibility for it altogether – a fact reinforced by this rebuttal.
“Support groups around the world will tell you that closure is just about impossible for victims when the abusers are protected by the church and the victims are made to feel that they are, in some way, responsible for their exploitation. The Vatican really must be challenged to change its ways and to show some repentance, not only for the deeds of its priests but for its own conspiracy to try to sweep the whole dreadful business under the carpet. The complacency exhibited by this supposed rebuttal shows that the problem goes to the most senior level in the Church.”
The right of reply was read out at the Human Rights Council in Geneva by a Vatican representative. When his comments were reported in the Guardian, they caused immediate worldwide outrage for their attempts to shift responsibility on to the shoulders of homosexuals and imagining that pointing out the failings of other religions in this area somehow absolved the Catholic Church.
As the Catholic blogger Andrew Sullivan put it: “This is Ratzinger’s real view: that the sex abuse crisis was basically a liberal plot to discredit the Church, rather than what it was, an international conspiracy for the molestation of children, enabled by the Vatican.”
The story of Keith’s speech and response quickly spread around the globe and it became clear from what was being written in the mainstream media and the blogosphere that the Vatican had shot itself in the foot with its scandalous attempt to deflect attention from its own misdeeds by trying to make out that others were even worse.
It wasn’t long, however, before the Catholic media and its apologists launched a vituperative counter attack that seemed at times desperate in its fury. Damian Thompson — the Daily Telegraph’s leader writer and editor of the Catholic Herald — was seething, that Ruth Gledhill, the Times religious affairs correspondent, had given a sympathetic hearing to Keith Porteous Wood in her blog.
Lifesite News, the website of a group of fundamentalist Catholics, also went over the top in its desperate bid to spare the Vatican’s blushes.
Religion News Service, an American wire service for the religious media, reported on its site (subscription only) that “The Rev. Federico Lombardi, head of the Holy See Press Office, confirmed the authenticity of the document but said that the Vatican had chosen not to publish it, in order not to ‘add gasoline to the fire’ on a volatile topic.”
This was further evidence that the Vatican hopes that if it tries its usual tactic of ignoring the problem and trying to downplay it, it will go away.
But finally, let us not forget what this is all about. It is about the trauma and life-destroying burden that has been inflicted on tens of thousands of people by Catholic priests. And the compounding of that suffering by the Vatican’s disgraceful attempts to cover them up, deny them and dismiss them.
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