Un Committee Undermined Its Own Message

The Ledger-Enquirer
February 6, 2014

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2014/02/06/2938493/un-committee-undermined-its-own.html

Did the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child presume to be speaking for the people of every member nation when it delved into matters of Catholic Church doctrine? If so, the UN just took another big step toward irrelevance -- a status its harshest critics think it achieved long ago.

That's a shame in this case, because the UN report on the specific issue of child sexual abuse within the church, and on the Catholic hierarchy's response (or lack of it), has some real moral authority.

"Child victims and their families have often been blamed by religious authorities," the UN panel wrote, "discredited and discouraged from pursuing their complaints and in some cases humiliated … Well-known sexual abusers have been transferred from parish to parish or to other countries in an attempt to cover up such crimes, a practice documented by numerous national commissions of inquiry." The report documented "a code of silence imposed on all members of the clergy under penalty of excommunication."

Make no mistake: The church -- as many genuinely outraged priests and other Catholic officials openly attest -- richly deserves universal censure for its protect-our-own response to child rape and molestation within its ranks. It's especially vulnerable to such censure given the fact that the Catholic Church, like every other faith institution, regularly weighs in with public pronouncements on humanity's moral issues.

Little if anything about the UN's judgment of the child abuse scandal misses the mark, including the recommendation that the Vatican should oust the perpetrators and leave them subject to criminal prosecution.

But, true to form, the UN couldn't stop there. The committee also weighed in on Catholic teachings about things like abortion, sexuality, gender equality and contraception. Those doctrines are a matter of choice, not law, and the Vatican was not unjustified in calling the UN's overreach a religious freedom issue.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, speaking for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Officials, acknowledged that "anyone bringing attention to the problem of sex abuse is moving toward solving it … Unfortunately they weakened it by throwing in the kitchen sink."

A freeze too far

We can take a lot. Southerners can and did endure bitter cold, broken pipes, hours of traffic gridlock, stranded and abandoned vehicles. We even endured the clueless condescension of Americans in colder climes, who found irresistibly funny our troubles in handling weather we almost never get.

But this is too much. We now learn that the freeze took its toll on … Vidalia onions.

The occasional bitter winter we can handle (well, sort of). Spring and summer without those sweet onions on our burgers and in our salads -- well, that's another matter altogether.