The UN committee investigating the Holy See’s compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child also advised the Catholic Church to change Canon Law, abandon its teachings on abortion and contraception and to exchange teaching on the sexual complementarity of men and women in favour of gender equality.
Though the president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops welcomed some of the specific recommendations that will help the bishops with their planned revision of From Pain to Hope, its 20-year- old document on clerical sexual abuse, Archbishop Paul-André Durocher said the committee weakened its report by “venturing into areas in the moral teachings of the Church.” The committee also failed to note the progress the Church has made.
“The report reflects the state of things as they used to be in the Church 20 years ago. It does not recognize the sea-change that has occurred in the Church since then,” said Durocher.
Durocher said the document “would have been stronger” if it had focused only on clerical sexual abuse, rather than the Holy See’s compliance in other areas. He welcomed, however, some of the recommendations, particularly concerning accountability.
Former Canadian Ambassador to the Holy See Anne Leahy said the report hurts the credibility of the UN. For example, in asserting the gender-identity agenda, the committee “has an axe to grind and grinds it.” Though it has “some valuable observations,” the document “veers into areas that are not in its mandate,” she said. “That is uncalled for.”
“There’s even a point where the committee report actually admonishes the Holy See on a certain way they voted on an issue,” she said. “How a state votes on an issue is its own sovereign business and not the business of 18 people on a committee.”
The report contains “so many outrageous comments where they actually lie about what the Pope has been doing over the past five years,” and that further “impugns their credibility,” she said.
Leahy said it is “egregious” for the report to say “the Holy See systematically placed preservation of the reputation of the Church and the alleged offender over the protection of child victims.”
“This was the attitude but it was publicly and openly changed under Pope Benedict XVI and that was at least five years ago,” she said, citing Benedict’s 2006 address to the bishops of Ireland and his 2010 Letter to the Church of Ireland, both public documents, among examples.
Leahy raised religious freedom concerns, echoing the Holy See’s official response which said it regrets “an attempt to interfere with Catholic Church teaching on the dignity of human persons and in the exercise of religious freedom.”
The Catholic Civil Rights League raised similar concerns.
“Church teaching is within the sole governance of the Church, and to suggest otherwise is to seriously infringe upon religious freedom,” said League president Philip Horgan. Abuse is “deplorable and must be rooted out,” the League said in a statement, but the report is “ideologically driven and fails to account for efforts addressing those issues over the past number of years, and unfairly overreaches with its proposals for change.”
Sr. Nuala Kenny, a pediatrician and former commissioner on the Winter Commission, an inquiry launched by the St. John’s archdiocese in 1989 to examine the sexual abuse by Christian Brothers at Mount Cashel, said the report saddened her.
“The Church still hasn’t done all that it ought,” she said. “But there’s a concern that even what it’s done, it doesn’t get credit for.”
While the Church has made “progress in some areas,” Kenney described it as “spotty and not consistent.”