Abuse survivor chastises Pope for smacking remark

THE POPE’S remarks backing the smacking of badly behaved children have been criticised as “most unhelpful” by a British survivor of clerical sexual abuse who is now a member of the Vatican’s child protection commission.

Meanwhile, a former president of Ireland says Francis’ apparent endorsement of corporal punishment for children calls into question whether the Vatican, a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, is really committed to the claimed aim of its universal abolition.

On Wednesday last week during his weekly audience the Pope recalled a conversation with a father, who told him that he hit his children on occasion if they had been naughty “but never in the face so as not to humiliate them”. Francis went on to say the father’s actions were “great … he had a sense of dignity. He should punish, do the right thing, and then move on.”

In response the founder of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, Peter Saunders, a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, told The Daily Telegraph that he thought the remarks were unhelpful, and intended to tell the pontiff so himself. Holy See spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said it was wrong to take them to mean Francis was encouraging parents to hit their children.

But former Irish president Mary McAleese in a letter to The Tablet said his comments had “turned the clock back considerably” on children’s rights.

She wrote: “What faith are we to have now in the Holy See’s commitment to the Convention on the Rights of the Child?”