Abuse report biased, says Lombardi

Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, has accused the United Nations’ committee on children’s rights of “ideological bias” because of its refusal to recognise all that the Holy See and the Church “have done in recent years” to combat the sexual abuse of minors.

“One cannot but observe that the tone, development and publicity given by the committee in its document are absolutely anomalous when compared to its normal progress in relations with other states that are party to the Convention [on the Rights of the Child],” the Jesuit said on 7 February. Two days earlier, the committee published a report excoriating the Holy See for lack of compliance with parts of the international treaty.

The UN committee questioned Holy See officials for nearly six hours at a 16 January public hearing in Geneva about its adherence to the convention. Fr Lombardi said the committee’s ensuing report had “not taken ­adequate account of the responses” the officials gave, suggesting that it had been “practically already written or at least clearly mapped out before the hearing”.

Nonetheless, he said it was “not appropriate to speak of a confrontation between the UN and the Vatican”, and said the Holy See would continue working with the UN “with openness to justified criticism” but “with courage and determination, without timidity”.

The head of the International Centre for Child Protection at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, Fr Hans Zollner SJ, said the recommendations in the UN report should be seen as an “incentive” by the Holy See. It was high time for the Vatican to face a UN evaluation, he told Vatican Radio on 7 February. “I have the impression that the Holy See did itself no favours by not delivering the requested reports for 14 years,” he said.

Fr Klaus Mertes, the Jesuit who triggered the wave of clerical abuse revelations which swept over the German-speaking countries in 2010, told the Kölner Stadtanzeiger that although not all the UN’s accusations were correct, the Vatican must allow external investigations and make its child protection procedures more transparent.

“Punishment must hurt the perpetrators, those who covered up for them and the institution that backed them,” he emphasised.