UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
Michael D’Antonio
This week in Geneva, the United Nation’s Committee on the Rights of the Child is hearing closed-door testimony about official Catholicism’s compliance with the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. One of almost 200 signatories to the convention, the Holy See (the formal name of the Vatican state) is fifteen years late in delivering a report describing whether it has acted to “protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence” as the convention requires. Victims of sexually abusive priests, their advocates, various American grand juries, Irish government investigators and their counterparts in other countries have turned up ample evidence that it has not.
The decades-long international scandal of sexual abuse and cover-ups by higher church authorities is so familiar that by now it requires little recounting. It’s sufficient to say that thousands of priests have been judged credibly accused by the church itself, which has paid billions of dollars to settle legal claims filed by victims. In America, roughly five hundred clergy have been convicted of crimes against children. In Ireland, the scandal is so great it has ruptured the historically tight bond between the state and the church. In Australia the parliament has begun a broad inquiry into sex crimes committed by Catholic clergy, which Cardinal George Pell of Sydney recently termed “a horrendous widespread mess.”
A global problem, the mess has eluded many efforts to clean it up, in part because of the strange status of the church. Spread across the world, and managed by a top-down hierarchy, it is comprised of thousands of corporate entities, from individual parishes to the Vatican bank. When sued by victims of child abuse, church officials prefer the institution be treated as a local entity, which means that higher authorities and the larger fortune held by various Catholic bureaucracies are protected. However, individual bishops accused of cover-ups, have sometimes found it convenient to point to authorities in distant Rome, shifting the moral burden to them when it seems like priest abusers were allowed, or even helped to evade responsibility for their acts. (In fact, the Vatican generally does have final say over the institutional response to claims against priests.)
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