UNITED STATES
Ledger-Enquirer
Did the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child presume to be speaking for the people of every member nation when it delved into matters of Catholic Church doctrine? If so, the UN just took another big step toward irrelevance — a status its harshest critics think it achieved long ago.
That’s a shame in this case, because the UN report on the specific issue of child sexual abuse within the church, and on the Catholic hierarchy’s response (or lack of it), has some real moral authority.
“Child victims and their families have often been blamed by religious authorities,” the UN panel wrote, “discredited and discouraged from pursuing their complaints and in some cases humiliated … Well-known sexual abusers have been transferred from parish to parish or to other countries in an attempt to cover up such crimes, a practice documented by numerous national commissions of inquiry.” The report documented “a code of silence imposed on all members of the clergy under penalty of excommunication.”
Make no mistake: The church — as many genuinely outraged priests and other Catholic officials openly attest — richly deserves universal censure for its protect-our-own response to child rape and molestation within its ranks. It’s especially vulnerable to such censure given the fact that the Catholic Church, like every other faith institution, regularly weighs in with public pronouncements on humanity’s moral issues.
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.