Vatican Defense Should Be Unnecessary
Though not a Catholic, I sympathize with the Vatican in its contest of wills against the UN Human Rights Committee. That committee represents no single nation but instead hires staff sympathetic to a political agenda and relies exclusively on the allegations of people claiming wrong-doing. The wrong-doing underlying current disagreement between the Vatican and the UN focuses particularly on pedophilia by predator priests, a horrible crime if true. Yet, Vatican law presumes innocence until guilt is firmly proven, as most other nations do.
The Church’s moral position has never faltered in its abhorrence of child victimization. However, the Church also strongly opposes homosexuality, abortion, and contraception, none of which bother the UN committee members or staff to any significant degree. Indeed, some committee staffers carry reputations as political advocates for those positions opposed by the Church.
More significant than the ideological lines clearly distinguishing the Church and the UN, the sovereignty of each varies markedly. The Vatican has been recognized for centuries as a sovereign entity entitled to legislate, execute, and adjudicate its own ecclesiastical laws over its citizens, including its priests, with the same legal force and effect employed by nation-states such as the United States, China, or Russia when they guard their legal procedures, laws, and sovereignty. In contrast, the UN is a voluntary amalgamation with no sovereign authority whatsoever. So when a UN committee alleges concealment of crime, it speaks with no legal authority. In contrast, under Church law silence is demanded. Granted, much of the world favors transparency, but openness and candor have never been part of the Vatican culture or its laws. Further, no amount of protest by UN committees will affect Vatican policies or doctrines, no matter how much committee members and staffers disagree with the Vatican.
No excuses can or should be made for pedophiles. However, in a significant majority of cases raised by the UN committee, no adjudication by a legal body supports labeling the priests so accused as convicted pedophiles. Perhaps the Church moves too slowly and too quietly to comfort actual victims of sexual assault by priests, yet the need for improvement in the Church’s legal procedures has been admitted and that improvement is underway, not because of UN clamoring but because the Vatican has heard reports of its members’ pain. Nonetheless, the Church through its Vatican government has every right to its own legal authority. It should not be expected to defend itself to a UN committee fundamentally opposed to Vatican principles.
That’s my view. What do you think?
http://www.voanews.com/content/scathing-un-report-demands-vatican-act-against-sex-abuse/1844754.html
