Huffington Post
[Submission to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child – BishopAccountability.org]
Aaron Vallely
Irish writer and essayist
There is a first time for everything, and last Thursday the Vatican was pushed to admit in public that it still does not force priests to report child sex crimes to authorities. Not only is this shameful, it is unacceptable. A UN panel held The Holy See accountable in a public interrogation regarding child abuse, and scrutinized the Vatican’s disgraceful and contemptuous record on dealing with child sexual abuse and torture. Although most people focused on the UN commission’s interrogation in Geneva that day, some spotted a curious observation in Rome. Time magazine’s Person of the Year, Pope Francis, or Jorge Mario Bergoglio, announced that these “scandals are the shame of the Church,” while a man whom accompanied him was Los Angeles Archbishop Emeritus, Cardinal Roger Mahony, a repugnant man who supervised more than 200 known pedophile priests with 500 known victims to whom he paid $720 million. It makes one think: What has this new Pope done about the sex abuse crisis?
The day following, the Associated Press reported that 400 priests were defrocked in the years 2011 and 2012. According to AP, a document was specifically prepared from data the Vatican collected to defend itself before the UN committee. And what of these criminal defrocked individuals, you might ask? Well, we don’t know. They remain free and at liberty to abuse again. Their identities are unknown, as are their whereabouts, and the nature of their crimes. Of them we know not much. Pope Francis has done nothing to help arm authorities with information they would need to apprehend these criminals.
A 2004 John Jay study identified 10,667 victim allegations made in the period from 1950-2002, which number increased to 15,235 through 2009. Many victims of sexual assault never report their victimization, and observers have estimated that there may be as many as 100,000 total victims in the United States alone.
On 1 July, the United Nation’s Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) sent a request to the pope for “detailed information on all cases of child sexual abuse committed by members of the clergy, brothers, or nunnery” from the past fifteen years, and set 1 November as a deadline for a reply. Missing the deadline, on 4 December, Pope Francis responded saying it was not the way his government practiced to “disclose information on specific cases unless requested to do so by another country as part of legal proceedings” and “that the Vatican can provide information only about known and alleged child sex crimes that have happened on Vatican property.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.