UNITED STATES
Crux
By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor November 20, 2015
Next week Vatican representatives will again testify before a United Nations panel. If the past is prologue, it could be another missed opportunity if the independent experts on the panel grind ideological axes instead of posing legitimate questions that actually fall within their purview.
In early 2014, the Vatican – technically the “Holy See,” the term for the Vatican as a sovereign entity – appeared before two different UN bodies, the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee Against Torture. In both cases, the panels pressed Vatican officials on the child sexual abuse scandals in Catholicism.
Experts wanted to know, for instance, why some priests accused of abuse in Europe or North America were seemingly able to escape punishment by relocating to developing nations, or why Church officials in some areas still resist full collaboration with police and prosecutors.
While insisting the Vatican is not responsible for supervising every one of the world’s 400,000 Catholic priests, a duty that instead falls to local bishops, officials of the Holy See recognized the importance of those questions, and they provided updates on reform efforts, in effect inviting the UN to help in the quest for best practices.
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