UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Thomas C. Fox | Jan. 21, 2014 NCR Today
For the first time in the decades-long church sex abuse scandal, senior Vatican officials last week appeared before an independent outside body charged with holding it responsible for protecting children.
They took a grilling in Geneva by the U.N.’s Committee on the Rights of the Child for the Vatican’s alleged failure to abide by terms of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The Vatican has long insisted it isn’t responsible for abusive priests because they aren’t employees of the Vatican, and they repeated the excuse last Thursday.
“Priests are not functionaries of the Vatican,” Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s U.N. ambassador in Geneva, told the committee. “Priests are citizens of their own states, and they fall under the jurisdiction of their own country.”
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