VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast
by Barbie Latza Nadeau Jul 11, 2013
Faced with a demands for explanations from the U.N.’s body on children’s rights, Pope Francis expanded the Vatican’s legal system to allow broader prosecution of sex crimes.
After years of non-compliance, the Vatican is finally being taken to task by the United Nation’s Commission for the Rights of the Child about its dodgy record on child sex abuse. And it looks like Pope Francis is taking it serious.
The Holy See was given until January to submit a detailed report to the United Nations answering very specific questions and providing confidential records and documentation about how and why Catholic diocese moved predatory priests between dioceses like chess pieces. And on Thursday, Pope Francis issued a “motu proprio” extending the scope of the Vatican City legal system to bolster criminal legislation against child sex abuse, possession of child pornography and child prostitution on Vatican grounds by Vatican staff, seen as a shot across the bow to those in the Holy See who have harbored secrets of the sex abuse scandal. The extended scope of the legal system should pave the way to greater transparency and even prosecution of those who may have been the great enablers of the Church’s worst sinners.
The U.N.’s request, called the “List of Issues to be Taken Up in Connection with the Consideration of the Second Periodic Report of the Holy See” outlines a series of concerns the U.N.’s child protection arm wants addressed, including requests like “please indicate whether the Holy See still label children born outside wedlock as ‘illegitimate children’ and whether it has assessed the consequences of the use of such terminology on the rights of these children.”
The commission also asks the Holy See to clarify its procedure in investigation child sex abuse claims both regarding the recent pedophile priest scandal and the historical use of so-called “Magdalene’s laundries” as Catholic slave workhouses where women of ill repute were kept. These laundries, according to the U.N.’s accusations, were widely used in Europe and North American from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and still in use in Ireland until 1996. “Please indicate whether an investigation was conducted by the Holy see into the complaints of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and of subjection to force labor of girls held in Magdalene’s laundries run by Catholic Sisters in Ireland until 1996,” the report demands. The U.N. also wants a clear record on the number of babies taken from their mothers in the Magdalene’s laundries, and placed in Catholic orphanages or given for adoption.
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