UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
Post by PATRICIA MILLER
The recent report from the UN Commission on the Status of the Child is being criticized as a missed opportunity to hold the Vatican’s feet to the fire on the issue of child sex abuse. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Vallely said the report “blundered into a wider attack on Catholic teachings on contraception, homosexuality and abortion” that allowed the Vatican to claim the UN had “gone beyond its proper area of competence.”
Jesuit priest Thomas Reese called the report an “editorial screed” in the National Catholic Reporter and said that “by getting into issues like abortion, birth control and homosexuality, the report only helps those in the church who oppose dealing with the crisis.”
According to these critics and the Vatican itself, the Commission has no business trying to impose what they precieve as the UN’s progressive morality on the Vatican. The irony is that the Vatican has long attempted to impose its values at the UN under the assertion that its morality is universal.
Under the Vatican’s ideology, women and adolescents have no rights outside the family and only procreative sex within marriage is legitimate. It was first challenged on these views at the historic 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development by a coalition of women’s rights groups. They wanted the UN to state that access to reproductive health services was a basic human right and that women and adolescents had a right to independently access information about their sexual health.
As Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi reported in His Holiness, when Nafis Sadik, head of the conference, sat down with Pope John Paul II to explain why this was important, he shot back, “In this area there can be no individual rights and needs. There can only be the couples’ rights and needs.” And by this he meant that access to reproductive health services and information needed to be policed by men as head of the family.
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