Selective Reporting on Clergy Sex Abuse?

No one ever heard about the U.N. Committee Against Torture until today, when every media outlet decided to take note of the obscure U.N. panel of 10 experts because they brought up Catholic clergy sex abuse.

Unfortunately reporters with major media outlets don’t always have the time to fact check their work because of deadlines. Instead of looking into the issues in any detail they repeated what the U.N. committee told the Vatican in Geneva.

If you look at the mainstream media reports you will find no mention of the responses of the Vatican to many of the questions brought up in the report of the committee. The Holy See actually responded to the very concerns raised in the concluding observations during a webcast meeting with the committee over two weeks ago. This journalistic failure means that the reporting on this story does not tell the whole story.

Specifically, there are a few cases that stick out, where one is even tempted to speak of selective reporting.

The news articles do not mention that the Vatican denied categorically that it ever moved priests around to avoid liability to sex abuse victims. If this ever happened in a particular dioceses the Vatican was not involved in any way.

The articles don’t explain that the only power the Pope has outside the wall of the Vatican City State is of a spiritual nature. The Holy Father cannot prosecute or arrest anybody outside the Vatican. The most he can do is suspend or defrock a priest.

Reporters brought up specific episodes mentioned by the committee to which the Holy See had responded already. They did not mention that the committee ignored the responses entirely. For example the case of a Polish Vatican diplomat who is accused of having abused children in Santo Domingo. The Holy See has already stated that it is carrying out a criminal investigation, since the diplomat is presently within the Vatican, and that any extradition, if any will take place after this investigation. But the committee said that the Vatican is refusing to extradite this diplomat to Poland (whose own jurisdiction in the matter is not even clear). 

Similarly, mainstream reports mention the episode of an Archbishop in Australia who did not hand over documents addressed to the Vatican to the Government because the request for the documents was not made through diplomatic channels. The Vatican did not say the documents were off limits, as the committee and the reporters imply, it simply insisted that proper diplomatic channels should be followed.

I could go on… But will devote myself to something more productive.

This whole affair reflects very poorly on the news media and the U.N. human rights framework, for all our sake, lets hope everyone forgets it. The unfortunate truth is, I doubt anyone will remember the U.N. committee after this, but they sure will remember the smear on the Catholic Church.

 

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