VATICAN CITY
New Straits Times
The UN’s damning report on the Vatican’s handling of child sex abuse cases has turned up the pressure on the Church to convince a sceptical international community it has adopted a zero-tolerance approach.
“The Vatican has taken some steps forward, but they have been largely symbolic: energetic words rather than actions. The UN is right to have spoken out so strongly,” Vatican commentator Paolo Flores D’Arcais told AFP.
The Church was denounced by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on Wednesday for failing to stamp out predatory priests, and urged to hand over known and suspected abusers for prosecution.
The UN committee’s recommendations are non-binding but have held up a fresh mirror to highly damaging Vatican failures.
The report was a bolt from the blue for an institution revelling in the popularity of its new pope, Francis, who has spoken little of the abuse and who appeared to hope the Church had left the crisis behind it.
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