In a sharply worded and detailed response to UN committee’s critical
report on the Vatican’s response to sexual abuse, the Vatican’s chief
spokesman has said that the committee’s recommendations “seem to go
beyond its competencies and to interfere in the very doctrinal and moral
positions of the Catholic Church.”
Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican press office,
released a lengthy response to the report by the UN Committee on the
Rights of the Child on February 7.
In his 3-page statement charged that
committee had neglected to pay attention to information submitted by the
Vatican, relying instead on reports from groups critical of the Church.
The Vatican spokesman strongly suggested that the report had been
drafted in advance, without waiting for the Vatican’s own report.
Most important, Father Lombardi charged, the UN committee had
overstepped its jurisdiction to attack the Church’s moral teaching. He
said that “the Committee’s comments in several directions seem to go
beyond its powers and to interfere in the very moral and doctrinal
positions of the Catholic Church, giving indications involving moral
evaluations of contraception, or abortion, or education in families, or
the vision of human sexuality, in light of own ideological vision of
sexuality itself.”
Father Lombardi made an extra effort to reaffirm the Vatican’s support
for the UN, and for the Convention on the Rights of the Child. He said
that the Holy See recognized the value of “serious and well founded”
criticism regarding the Church’s response to the sex-abuse scandal.
However, he said that the UN committee’s report was a biased
presentation.
The Church has suffered from “unjustly harmful” media scrutiny in the
sex-abuse crisis, Father Lombardi said, and the enormous attention
accorded to the UN committee’s report was an example of that unequal
treatment. He pointed out that the same committee’s reports on other
nations have rarely been given media attention, even when the reports
point to grave violations of children’s rights.
Father Lombardi also complained that the UN committee’s report shows a
“lack of understanding of the specific nature of the Holy See.” The
Vatican, he explained, does not control the behavior of priests in every
country, and cannot be responsible for law-enforcement efforts outside
its own limited jurisdiction. He observed that this point had been made
repeatedly to members of the UN committee, and “one is entitled to
amazement” that the point had not been absorbed.
Repeating a point that had been made by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the
Vatican’s representative at the Holy See, Father Lombardi said that
Vatican officials had provided the UN committee with a thorough briefing
on the Holy See’s responses to sexual abuse, yet this information was
not incorporated in the committee’s report. These omissions, he said,
“suggest that it was practically already written, or at least already in
large part blocked out before the hearing.”