VATICAN CITY
Gazzetta del Sud
Vatican City, February 7 – This week’s report by the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child shows “grave limits” in a misunderstanding “of the specific nature of the Holy See”, Spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said Friday, accusing the committee of prejudice while insisting relations with the UN as a whole were still sound. On Wednesday the Committee issued a wide-ranging report that excoriated the Vatican for adopting policies that it said allowed sexual abuse of tens of thousands of children by clergymen and demanded immediate action. Lombardi said the Vatican was entitled to be “baffled” by the Geneva-based committee’s failure to understand the makeup of the Church, not just as a religious institution but as a juridical entity. Critics of the report argue it asks too much of the Holy See, which despite being the central government of the international Church is nevertheless incapable of directly overseeing every local parish that caters to the world’s more than one billion Catholics. For instance, it would be impossible, critics add, to track spending on children in Catholic institutions worldwide, or to create an international monitoring body to be made accessible to all children in all the Church’s hundreds of thousands of educational institutions, as the report urges it to do.
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