UNITED KINGDOM
The New York Times
By PAUL VALLELY
FEB. 11, 2014
LONDON — Boys have been raped. Priests have lied. Bishops have been complicit in cover-ups. Evidence has been shredded, whistle-blowers undermined, silence has been bought and victims given false promises. And yet for all that, the blistering critique of the United Nations report on sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church may end up doing more harm than good.
The case against the church is clear. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child refers to tens of thousands of crimes by priestly abusers over several decades. It calls on the church to remove all abusers from active ministry, report them to the police and open its archives on the 4,000 cases which have been referred to the Vatican.
But the report naïvely, or ideologically, also blundered into a wider attack on Catholic teachings on contraception, homosexuality and abortion. That prompted the Vatican to respond with a forceful counterattack claiming the United Nations has gone beyond its proper area of competence — and, indeed, has violated the safeguards on religious freedom in its own Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The focus on child abuse has been lost in the row, with Vatican apologists tweeting about the Holy See being ambushed by a kangaroo court. The United Nations process, some said, had been driven by NGOs with an anti-Catholic agenda on reproductive rights. Dark remarks were made about getting the General Assembly to impose a code of conduct on United Nations human rights committees to make them more accountable.
All this has shifted attention from the key question: Is the church doing enough to deal with the abuse? Yet that is not the only reason that the United Nations committee may have made a tactical blunder by attacking wider Catholic values. For all the unified public pronouncements from church spokesmen, the reality is that behind the scenes the Vatican is deeply divided on the issue.
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