UNITED KINGDOM
National Secular Society
Posted: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 11:30 by Keith Porteous Wood
Will the UN finally bring the Vatican to account for its child abuse crimes?
As a United Nations Committee on children’s rights confronts the Vatican on its abysmal record on clerical paedophilia and criminal cover-ups, Keith Porteous Wood describes his role in bringing the Holy See to account.
Hardly a month passes without a further scandal emerging of child rape and other sexual violence by clerics acting under the auspices of the Catholic Church.
In the first week of July (2013), as well as a scandal with the Vatican Bank that resulted in its top two executives being fired, there was the release of devastating court papers on the RC Diocese of Milwaukee in which countless boys in a Catholic school for the deaf were abused, presumably chosen because of their reduced capacity to communicate.
An attorney for some of the victims alleges that there were more than 8,000 cases of abuse by more than 100 staff. A harrowing film Mea Maxima Culpa has been made about this.
The diocese has declared itself bankrupt, limiting the funds available to victims of abuse. It transpires from the 6,000 pages of these court papers (just 10% of the total which the Church failed to have suppressed) that the then Archbishop, now the top US Cardinal Timothy Dolan, had transferred nearly $57 million shortly before the bankruptcy was declared to offer, in his words, “an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability”. The papers also show that the Vatican readily agreed to this transfer.
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