VATICAN CITY
Catholic Culture
In a sharply worded and detailed response to UN committee’s critical report on the Vatican’s response to sexual abuse, the Vatican’s chief spokesman has said that the committee’s recommendations “seem to go beyond it competencies and to interfere in the very doctrinal and moral positions of the Catholic Church.”
Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican press office, released a lengthy response to the report by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on February 7. In his 3-page statement charged that committee had neglected to pay attention to information submitted by the Vatican, relying instead on reports from groups critical of the Church. The Vatican spokesman strongly suggested that the report had been drafted in advance, without waiting for the Vatican’s own report.
Most important, Father Lombardi charged, the UN committee had overstepped its jurisdiction to attack the Church’s moral teaching. He said that “the Committee’s comments in several directions seem to go beyond its powers and to interfere in the very moral and doctrinal positions of the Catholic Church, giving indications involving moral evaluations of contraception, or abortion, or education in families, or the vision of human sexuality, in light of own ideological vision of sexuality itself.”
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.