Challenging the Vatican’s Father-knows-best Morality

By Patricia Miller
Religion Dispatches
February 14, 2014

http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/patriciamiller/7596/challenging_the_vatican_s_father_knows_best_morality/

The recent report from the UN Commission on the Status of the Child is being criticized as a missed opportunity to hold the Vatican’s feet to the fire on the issue of child sex abuse. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Vallely said the report “blundered into a wider attack on Catholic teachings on contraception, homosexuality and abortion” that allowed the Vatican to claim the UN had “gone beyond its proper area of competence.”

Jesuit priest Thomas Reese called the report an “editorial screed” in the National Catholic Reporter and said that “by getting into issues like abortion, birth control and homosexuality, the report only helps those in the church who oppose dealing with the crisis.”

According to these critics and the Vatican itself, the Commission has no business trying to impose what they precieve as the UN's progressive morality on the Vatican. The irony is that the Vatican has long attempted to impose its values at the UN under the assertion that its morality is universal.

Under the Vatican’s ideology, women and adolescents have no rights outside the family and only procreative sex within marriage is legitimate. It was first challenged on these views at the historic 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development by a coalition of women’s rights groups. They wanted the UN to state that access to reproductive health services was a basic human right and that women and adolescents had a right to independently access information about their sexual health.

As Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi reported in His Holiness, when Nafis Sadik, head of the conference, sat down with Pope John Paul II to explain why this was important, he shot back, “In this area there can be no individual rights and needs. There can only be the couples’ rights and needs.” And by this he meant that access to reproductive health services and information needed to be policed by men as head of the family.

This began what in effect became a 30-year running battle between the Vatican and women’s health advocates over the wording of every single UN document that dealt with women’s health or rights and eventually the definition of family. They were joined by LGBT rights and anti-HIV/AIDS advocates who sought to break the Vatican’s stranglehold on “morality” at the UN.

Writing in Conscience magazine after a particularly bitter series of dust-ups, then-Catholics for Choice President Frances Kissling, and Serra Sippel, who now heads the Center for Health and Gender Equity, explained why it was so difficult to challenge the Vatican’s ideology. “Men who were educated within patriarchal religious traditions,” they wrote, are likely to accept this perspective as the norm, while progressive perspectives “are seen as ‘new’ and less legitimate.”

It was Catholics for Choice and a coalition of progressive Catholic organizations who asked the UN in 2002 to hold the Vatican accountable for violating the Convention on the Rights of the Child, under which it had pledged to protect the health and well being of children and adolescents. Now the UN has done so. It’s no longer accepting the Vatican’s father-knows-best morality as the default, whether it’s in refusing to cooperate with civil authorities in policing sexual predators, deciding what kind of families are legitimate, or denying women and teenagers information to prevent unwanted pregnancy or AIDS.