Covering up tyrants and horrors: save the sermon
Il Giornale, February 6, 2014
In its recent report on the Catholic Church, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child painted the Church as a nest of lurking monsters, maintaining that it has "systematically" adopted policies that allowed priests to rape and molest tens of thousands of innocent children over the years. The report calls on the Church to open its files on pedophile priests and priests whose crimes have been covered up, as well as files related in any way to the Church's positions on homosexuality, abortion, and contraception. The language is typical for the UN, an organization that is aggressive and biased in favor of its automatic majorities and ideological preferences, with no concern about whether those rights are respected by those who submit the documents and vote on the motions while waving the banner of human rights. It would be very difficult to find a trace of respect for homosexuals in many of the countries that make up the various Commissions for human rights, including this one, countries in which gays are routinely executed or imprisoned. It would also be difficult to find respect for the right of little girls to be left in peace until they reach a reasonable age, as they are often married off at 7 to 10 years of age.
It is clear that the UN always acts in the name of the most fundamental human rights, and it is also clear that the nerve touched here can and must impel and mobilize anyone having a modicum of common sense: violence against children—particularly sexual violence, which takes advantage of their innocence and good faith—is the vilest crime, and the Church indeed knowssomething about this. The sexual abuse scandals began to emerge in the early 2000s in the United States, and extended to include nearly all countries with seminaries and parishes - Canada, Ireland, Australia, Norway, Poland, among others. In 2004, research carried out in the United States showed that between 1950 and 2002, there were 10,667 victims of sexual abuse under the age of 18, involving 4% of the 109,694 priests who worked in the USA. The figure was frighteningly high, but certainly containable and manageable, despite the protracted, and certainly reprehensible, reticence on the part of the Church. This is why the Church chose to respond—though not as it should have—to the growing public demand for action. For example, Benedict XVI defrocked 400 priests between 2011 and 2012, and tried, with the help of his advisers, to aid the course of justice. Today, Pope Francis insists on maximum transparency. It was Benedict XVI who said that the Church had addressed the problem "too slowly" and that the pedophile priests scandal "had been badly handled."
So the UN committee's attack is based on historical fact, but it also has its own history, which tarnishes its judgments. In fact, doubts immediately arose concerning its timing and methods, when members who so zealously hand down such condemnations are also such seasoned liars. How can we seriously rely on a judgment about violence against children when the Committee members include Thailand, Syria, and Uganda? In Thailand, there are an estimated 400,000 children under the age of 16, forced under known traffickers, often involved with sexual tourism. In Syria, the worst of all abuses against children are carried out in a deliberate and planned manner, where adversaries in disputes persecute, murder, kidnap, torture, and sexually assault children in order to psychologically debilitate their enemy. Then there is Uganda, where at least 25,000 children between the ages of 11 and 16 are forced into war, armed against one another and forced to shoot, to tear each other apart like roosters in a cockfight. To avoid being captured and thrown into battle or used in every possible way by adults, thousands of children have become "night commuters" moving incessantly in the dark, alone and hungry.
How are we to believe that only the Vatican, which certainly has its own wrongs to answer for, can be consistently held up for public ridicule when, according to data from UNICEF, 223 million children throughout the world are victims of abuse, and the UN takes no action to truly improve this situation? How can we imagine that the greatest cause of sexual violence emanates from the cupola of the Vatican, when forced marriage between adult men and underage girls—some younger than eight years old—is practiced throughout the Muslim world? International organizations are very unwilling to talk about this issue - it's not comfortable for the UN, as the practice of pedophilic marriage is deeply rooted throughout the Islamic world and beyond, and, in various parliaments, age-of-consent laws tend to run up against resistance from clerics and local customs. In Morocco, the cleric Mohammed ben Abderrahman Al Maghraoui issued a fatwa legitimizing marriage to a 9-year-old girl, and there are others that authorize marriage at an even younger age. So, if you want to fight pedophilia, then do it. But no UN commission has ever questioned this clear violation of human rights, despite the fact that tens of millions of girls could be saved from what is clearly sexual abuse.
This article originally appeared in slightly different form in Italian in Il Giornale; English copyright, The Gatestone Institute