UNITED STATES
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
For immediate release: Monday, April 14, 2014
Statement by Mary Caplan of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 917 439 4187, mcaplan682@aol.com )
People are safest when power is checked. But roughly one billion people are involved in an institution in which power is basically unchecked. It’s the Catholic Church. And its structure leaves their children vulnerable to those who would commit and conceal child sex crimes.
That vulnerability is not just historic, it’s current. Kids remain in harm’s way in the church today.
And that unhealthy, rigid, secretive, hierarchical, virtually all-male structure is not changing. Despite hundreds of thousands of children being sexually violated by clergy, top Catholic officials have done and are doing virtually nothing to institute a series of “checks and balances” that would make innocent kids and vulnerable adults safer – by deterring cover ups, by exposing predators, or by punishing wrongdoers.
They are making promises and adopting policies and establishing protocols and issuing apologies, none of which matter because the real decision-makers in the church – the clergy – have all the power and continue to abuse it for selfish ends: power, prestige and promotions.
So that’s why we are turning to secular authorities to do what religious figures refuse to do: hold Catholic officials responsible for the pledges they’ve made and the choices they make – reckless, callous and deceitful choices – to protect guilty adults over innocent children.
Vatican officials signed a treaty on the rights of the child. In February, they were held responsible – via a blistering United Nations report – for breaking that treaty.
We hope the UN’s Committee on Torture will issue a similar report after they read the evidence and question Vatican officials in May in Geneva.
These United Nations panels have no subpoena power. They can’t compel testimony. They can’t arrest, charge, convict or imprison anyone.
They can investigate, however, and issue reports and use their “bully pulpits” to do what most other secular authorities are too small, under-funded or timid to do – call out Catholic officials for saying one thing and doing another, and for putting children in harm’s way time and time and time again, not just in years past, but today as well. They can lay out recommendations that remind us of the enormous gulf between how Catholic officials deal with sexual violence and how they SHOULD deal with sexual violence.
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