UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
As Nick Cumming-Bruce reports for the New York Times, Vatican representative to the United Nations Archbishop Silvano Tomasi was grilled yesterday by the U.N. Committee on Torture. The committee is asking searching questions about whether the Vatican’s less than optimal response to the crisis caused by revelations of the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic authority figures represents a violation of the Vatican treaty with the U.N. regarding torture.
Tomasi’s hair-splitting strategy: he claimed that the Vatican’s responsibility vis-a-vis the treaty ends at the boundary lines of the tiny Vatican City state. As Cumming-Bruce notes, last week, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi laid a foundation for the hair-splitting by arguing that ideological pressure groups are seeking to link the Vatican’s (non-)response to the abuse situation with violation of the treaty on torture.
Jerry Slevin responds to Lombardi at his Christian Catholicism blog:
Most international lawyers and tens of thousands of children sexually abused, often brutally by priests, likely see this differently than childless and celibate Jesuits like Fr. Lombardi and Pope Francis. Trained on the texts of the medieval scholastics, these Jesuits are taking “hairsplitting and legalisms” to new heights. It is almost obscene to try to make this distinction. As Fr. Lombardi noted, the treaty covers “… torture AND OTHER cruel … treatment…”
If child rape, facilitated since 1910 by making Catholic children begin at seven years old making confession in a dark box to an unknown priest, is not “cruel treatment”, what is? What is wrong with you, Fr. Lombardi and Pope Francis? We are talking about defenseless kids. Did you exchange your humanity when you took your Jesuit vows?
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