The Guardian (UK)
Nicky Woolf and Angela Bruno in New York with Jonathan Watts in Havana and Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome …
Pope Francis may be speaking to adulatory crowds in Cuba, but in New York, groups representing children abused by Catholic priests are preparing for his visit.
Today, representatives from three organizations held a press conference at the United Nations, urging the Vatican to take concrete steps to address sexual assault and its cover-up in the Catholic Church.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said:
Francis often talks of mercy. He’s right to do so. But hundreds of thousands of innocent boys and girls have been raped by priests, nuns, bishops, and seminarians because of excessive mercy shown to criminal clerics by their complicit colleagues. Mercy won’t protect children from child-molesting clergy.”
BishopAccountability.org, an archival and research group that gathers documents and data about the global crisis of sexual abuse of children within the Roman Catholic Church, said in a statement:
The catastrophe of child sex abuse abuse in the Catholic church has not been resolved, and an especially alarming aspect of it has been revealed recently: Priests who have been kicked out of U.S. dioceses because of child sex abuse allegations are thriving today in church assignments in South America and the Philippines, according to our global research as well as a new investigation by GlobalPost.
We urge Pope Francis to mark his first visit to the United States by announcing an end to this terrible situation.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights is a legal and advocacy human rights organization that has represented SNAP at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the United Nations in Geneva. They issued the following statement:
Pope Francis’s public statements about the Vatican’s concern for children and other survivors of sexual assault by priests are at odds with the Vatican’s actions under his leadership. This week, amidst discussions of climate change at the United Nations General Assembly and elsewhere, he should explain the Vatican’s formal submissions to the UN committees that called them to account last spring.
To the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee Against Torture, they made the preposterous claim they were only responsible for what happens inside the .44 square kilometer of Vatican City and have no responsibility for what happens outside its walls.
Worse, his representatives told the Committee Against Torture that rape and sexual assault by priests do not amount to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment and refused to provide both committees with the information they had requested—once again minimizing the damage the church has caused and denying the severity of the physical and mental harm survivors live with every day.
If Francis wants to truly bring change to the church, he must ensure the Vatican complies with the United Nations requests and recommendations, increase transparency when dealing with these crimes, and order all cases and reports turned over to local civil authorities for independent investigation.
A Guardian report from last week highlighted how the shadow of sexual abuse may loom over the Pope’s visit to the us.
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