VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast
Barbie Latza Nadeau
Vatican thumbs its nose at UN report blasting them for covering up sex crimes.
At face value, it really doesn’t seem like such a tough request. On Wednesday, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child delivered their hard-hitting final report with blunt recommendations after last month’s panel on child sex abuse with Vatican officials in Geneva. In the report, they lambasted the Vatican’s “code of secrecy” in covering up years of clerical sex abuse involving children and demanded the “immediate removal” of any and all clergy currently working in dioceses that have been accused of child abuse or child pornography. A very defensive Vatican statement said that the UN’s recommendations would be “submitted to a thorough study and examination.” Silvano Maria Tomasi, the Vatican’s observer at the UN in Geneva, later implied that the child rights group was crossing the line. “Trying to ask the Holy See to change its teachings is not negotiable,” he told Vatican Radio.
The United Nations has been trying to reign in the Vatican on the issue of the child sex abuse scandal for nearly a decade. In the first line of the report, they thanked the Vatican for submitting questions clarifying its second periodic report to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which the Vatican is a signatory. But they added, “The Committee however regrets that the report was submitted with a six-year delay and that the Holy See did not respond to questions relating to the implementation of the Optional Protocol by persons and institutions placed under its legal authority.”
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