CHICAGO (IL)
Chicago Sun-Times

EDITORIALS

February 9, 2014

The Vatican could learn something from the Chicago way, and we mean that in a good sense.

On Wednesday, a United Nations human rights panel ripped the Vatican for not doing enough to prevent abuse of children by priests. The committee said a decades-long code of secrecy and the silencing of abuse victims to protect the church’s reputation let priests sexually abuse tens of thousands of children worldwide.

The blistering report by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child sounds a lot like what we’ve heard over the years about the Archdiocese of Chicago, where for years allegations were hushed up and priests known to have abused children were quietly switched to different parishes, where they resumed their predatory behavior and added to the horrific annals of painful human tragedy.

But in the early 1990s, the archdiocese changed…