Un Report on Child Rights Challenges Vatican to Mend Its Ways: Editorial

Toronto Star
February 9, 2014

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2014/02/09/un_report_on_child_rights_challenges_vatican_to_mend_its_ways_editorial.html

UN report will help Pope Francis amplify his message that the Vatican must get tough on clerical sex abusers.

It’s a scathing report, bound to shake up Catholics who are comfortable in their pews. But the United Nations committee that has just lambasted the Vatican for letting clerical sex abusers get away with their crimes will help amplify Pope Francis’ message that the church in its entirety needs to clean up its act because its credibility is on the line.

Three popes now have forcefully condemned clerical abuse of children. John Paul II denounced it as “appalling sin” and outright “crime.” Benedict XVI promised to rid the church of such “filth.” And Francis has ordered Vatican prosecutors and bishops to “act decisively” to make sure that minors are protected and abusers are held to account. The Church’s moral witness and credibility is riding on this, he warned.

It is indeed, and the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child has forcefully reminded Catholic clerics and laity alike of just how harshly the wider world judges the church’s tragic failings in this area, including here in Canada, and its slowness to come to terms with past abuses. Stinging as it is, the high-profile UN report issued this past week serves to highlight some of what remains to be done. It stems from a routine review of how signatories to the Convention on the Rights of the Child are living up to their obligations. The Holy See signed on in 1990.

The report bluntly faults the Vatican for “systematically” putting the church’s reputation above the protection of children. Clerics molested “tens of thousands of children worldwide,” it says, while bishops failed to hold them accountable, imposed a code of silence and covered up the crimes. The UN wants the Vatican to order the commission on sex abuse that Francis set up last year to function as a sort of truth panel, investigating the hierarchy’s response to past cases of abuse, holding senior clerics to account and throwing open archives.

The UN also wants the Vatican to establish clear, church-wide “best practices” rules that compel bishops and pastors across the vast 1-billion-member church to report abuse, remove offending clerics and alert police. And it urges compensation for victims. That certainly makes sense. It would formalize and universalize practices that the Canadian church adopted two decades ago. Clerics are screened, church volunteers face background checks and abuse must be reported to the authorities. That should be the strict rule everywhere.

And while the UN report pays tribute to the church’s good work providing vulnerable kids around the world with schooling, health, social care and other services, it says more can be done to advance their basic rights.

It urges the Vatican to remove gender stereotyping from Catholic school textbooks. To ban corporal punishment. To remind parents and teachers that kids have the right to express their views freely, and deserve to be taken seriously. To condemn discrimination against gay children and those raised by same-sex couples. And to make sure that kids are taught about safe sex, family planning, and preventing sexually transmitted diseases.

In places, the UN report over-reaches. It urges the Vatican to soften its stand against abortion, for example. That is expecting too much. Vatican officials have pushed back, too, on aspects of the report that challenge church teaching on homosexuality, sexuality and contraception. They also point out, reasonably, that the UN doesn’t give enough credit for reforms that have been made.

Yet for all that the UN’s basic judgment about the abuse scandal is sound. As Pope Francis recognizes, the church needs to be honest about its failings, protective of its children and awake to the modern world. This report helps make his case.