Vatican Seeking to Limit Its Responsibility for Sex Abuse

By Liam Moloney
Wall Street Journal
May 5, 2014

http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-524175/

ROME—The Holy See aimed Monday to limit its responsibility to the tiny Vatican City State for the global clerical scandal as its officials come under questioning by a new United Nations panel—this time one on torture.

Vatican officials said they regretted the abuses of the past, but that measures that the Catholic Church has put in place in recent years show a drop in cases of abuses of minors, an area that has been of particular embarrassment to it and caused many faithful to leave.

Documentation “shows a stabilization or decline in cases of pedophilia…measures put in place in the past 10 years by the Holy See and local [Catholic] churches has shown a positive decline,” Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See’s permanent observer to the U.N., told members of the panel on the Convention against Torture at a session in Geneva.

The U.N. committee is listening to the Holy See representatives Monday and Tuesday as part of monitoring the implementation of the treaty against torture. The Holy See ratified the 1984 convention in 2002.

Monday’s panel questioning focused on determining whether the Vatican’s history of child abuse by priests constitutes a violation of the Convention against Torture.