BY Ian Dunn | February 5 | 
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Vatican: UN report on Church response to abuse is biased
Today’s highly critical UN report on the Church’s handling of abuse of children by clergy is distorted, unfair and ideologically biased, according to the Vatican.
Archbishop Tomasi (above), told Vatican Radio today that his first reaction to the report was ‘surprise’ because ‘the document doesn’t seem to have been updated to take into account what has been done in the past few years’ by the Vatican and individual bishops’ conferences.
Responding to criticisms in the report on the Church’s stance on homosexuality, abortion and contraception, the Archbishop also said the world body cannot ask the Church to change its ‘non-negotiable’ moral teachings.
Archbishop Tomasi, the head of the Holy See’s delegation to the United Nations in Geneva, told Vatican Radio that the kind of non-governmental organisations that favour same-sex ‘marriage’ probably influenced the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to reinforce an ‘ideological line’ in the report.
The UN committee on the Rights of the Child report has demanded that the Vatican ‘immediately remove’ all clergy who are known or suspected child abusers and turn them over to civil authorities.
It also said the Holy See should also hand over its archives on sexual abuse of tens of thousands of children so that culprits, as well as those who may have ‘concealed their crimes,’ could be held accountable. A commission created by Pope Francis in December should investigate all cases of child sexual abuse ‘as well as the conduct of the Catholic hierarchy in dealing with them,’ the report said.
At a public session last month, the committee questioned Vatican about the abuse of children by Catholic priests. The committee’s recommendations are non-binding and there is no enforcement mechanism. Rather, the UN asked the Vatican to implement the recommendations and report back by 2017.
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