UNITED STATES
NET – PBS Newshour
GWEN IFILL: The Vatican has long been criticized for its handling of sexual abuse cases, but today’s report from a United Nations panel was especially harsh.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child said the Vatican had not adequately acknowledged past crimes, and cultivated a code of silence that provided immunity for perpetrators. The Vatican calls the report distorted and unfair, in that it ignores corrective actions taken by the church.
Here to flesh out those arguments are Reverend Thomas Rosica, chief executive officer of Canada’s Catholic Salt and Light Television Network and an English-language spokesperson for the Vatican, and Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the center for constitutional rights.
Reverend Rosica, how does this report, in your opinion, differ from what we have heard before?
REV. THOMAS ROSICA, Catholic Salt and Light Television Network: First of all, let me address the question of sex abuse, and that this report has a central mission to address that.
It is criminal. It is evil, and the church is doing everything possible to address the issue, particularly since 2001, when all of this exploded in Boston and other places in the United States. What I find disturbing about the report, basically three areas. It’s a great deal of ignorance that the committee reveals in the report, first of all, ignorance of what the church has already done, and what the church is doing, especially under the pontificate of Pope Benedict, and now under Pope Francis.
Secondly, there is gross mis-ignorance — gross ignorance, I should say, of the understanding of the reality of the church. How is the church structured? One could read the report and get the impression that the church is this huge monolithic structure, the headquarters, if you will, dictating to all the branch offices.
That’s not the reality of the church. And a very serious point of the report is its ability to meddle in the internal life of the church, in the basic tenets of our faith, what some would call the doctrinal issues. And the report is contradictory in a couple areas. …
KATHERINE GALLAGHER, Center for Constitutional Rights: Well, we see today is quite a historic day.
We at CCR represent of Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests. And for survivors who have been working for decades to bring to global attention the scope and scale and the severity of sexual violence against children, we are very gratified by the U.N.’s report today. It’s notable that the U.N. calls out not just the perpetrators, the individual perpetrators, but also the higher-level officials whose own practices and policies have enabled the continuation of sexual violence by covering up instances of violence — violence, by requiring confidentiality, by shifting priests from one jurisdiction to another without any warning, where they again commit more acts of sexual assault.
So we see today’s report, which recognizes that the Catholic Church, the Vatican puts its reputation over the safety of children, as a very, very welcome report.
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