GENEVA
Kansas City Star
January 16
BY JOHN ZAROCOSTAS
McClatchy Foreign Staff
GENEVA — Senior Vatican officials came under a barrage of critical questions by an independent United Nations panel Thursday over the Roman Catholic Church’s response to allegations of child sexual abuse by members of the clergy in many countries.
It was the first time representatives of the Holy See had been asked in an international forum to provide testimony about the hundreds of cases that have been documented globally, including in the United States, Ireland, Australia, Mexico, and Spain.
The U.N. had jurisdiction to compel the Vatican to respond because the Vatican is one of 193 countries that have signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Holy See, which became a signatory in 1990, submitted an implementation report in 1994, but did not submit a progress report until 2012 — following mounting pressure from advocacy groups in the face of sexual abuse cases.
Monsignor Silvano Tomasi, who headed the Vatican delegation, argued that the church isn’t alone in harboring child abusers. “Abusers are found among members of the world’s most respected professions, most regrettably, including members of the clergy and other church personnel,” he said. But he also acknoweldged that abuse by priests was “particularly serious, since these persons are in positions of great trust.”
“Such crimes can never be justified, ” he said
But Tomasi provided no figures on how many cases of sexual abuse the church was aware of and how many times it had referred clergy to national authorities for prosecution — two key questions that members of the Committee on the Rights of the Child posed.
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