GENEVA
NPR
by SCOTT NEUMAN
January 16, 2014
The Vatican is coming in for tough scrutiny on its handling of the priest sex abuse scandal from a United Nations committee meeting in Geneva on Thursday.
The U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) took church officials to task during what The Associated Press described as a “grilling” that insisted the Holy See “take all appropriate measures to keep children out of harm.”
The Vatican ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, but as the BBC reports, it failed to submit any progress reports until 2012, well after revelations of child sex abuse in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.
“The Holy See gets it,” Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s former sex crimes prosecutor, told the committee. “Let’s not say too late or not. But there are certain things that need to be done differently.”
NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli reports from Rome that Scicluna was the Holy See’s chief sex crimes prosecutor for the past decade. He’s credited “with overhauling Vatican procedures to prosecute pedophile priests, but the Vatican has refused to instruct its bishops to report suspected cases of abuse to police whether required to do by local law or not,” she says.
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