GENEVA
Wall Street Journal
U.N. Panel Grills Vatican on Sex-Abuse Cases
By LIAM MOLONEY
Jan. 16, 2014
ROME—Vatican officials told a United Nations panel Thursday that Roman Catholic Church leaders need to do more to grapple with cases of sex abuse by clergy but reiterated that the church has limited jurisdiction in tackling the problem.
In one of the church’s most public grillings for its handling of sex- abuse scandals around the world, Vatican officials faced hours of tough questions in Geneva from a committee on its implementation of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls for signatories to take measures to protect children. The Holy See signed on to the convention in 1990.
“The Holy See gets it—I don’t want to say, finally—that certain things have to be done differently,” said Bishop Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s sexual-crime prosecutor for 10 years until 2012. “It isn’t the policy of the Holy See to cover up.”
Still, Vatican officials added that the church has little legal basis to punish clergy and other church members for sexual abuse. “[Priests] are citizens of their own states and fall under the jurisdiction of their own country,” said Archbishop Silvano Tomasi at the session that was broadcast live on the Internet.
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