A UN Human Right commission has attacked the Catholic Church and the Vatican concerning its canon law, policies and teachings.
The report, published today by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child harshly criticized the Church for its teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality as well as the Vatican's policies on dealing with pedophile priests in a report whose tone can only be defined as frenzied and aggressive.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is one of 10 U.N. bodies that monitor implementation of the core U.N. human rights treaties, and its 18 members include academics, sociologists and child development specialists from around the globe.
The treaty the committee is supposed to be monitoring is the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the key U.N. treaty on child protection, which the Holy See ratified in 1990. Apparently the committee simply decided to get into issues of abortion, contraception and homosexuality, none of which are covered by the treaty just because...or perhaps at the urging of various pro-abortion and pro Homosexual marriage activists.
The report blasted the Vatican and claims that it "systematically" adopted policies that allowed priests to molest children over decades, and it called on the Holy See to open its files on pedophiles and bishops who concealed the abuse.
"The committee is gravely concerned that the Holy See has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by, and the impunity of, the perpetrators," the report said.
That would be news to the almost 400 priests that have been defrocked and tossed out of the Church, the ones who justifiably have done or are doing jail time and the Church officials who paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to the victims, leaving several dioceses in the US either bankrupt or teetering on the edge.
But wait, there's more. The committee calls on the Church to change its policies to allow abortion and contraception, make sex education, including access to information about contraception and abortion mandatory in Catholic schools and to accept gay marriage and same sex adoption.
Now, I am not a Catholic, and to be honest, I have my own issues with the Catholic Church as an institution based on its history, its policies toward the State of Israel and other topics we need not delve into here. But I don't have to be Catholic to recognize the abject cowardice and hypocrisy on display here.
While I might not agree totally with the Church's stance on abortion, it is the supreme irony to me that a committee charged with monitoring the rights of children would issue a report biased towards abrogating the one right that is the source of all the others - the right to life.
By demanding that the Catholic Church change its religious doctrines on homosexuality, contraception and abortion, the UN committee is essentially saying that the Catholic Church is to be singled out from all other religions as one that sanctions bigotry, intolerance and hatred.And here I thought Jews and Israel had that particular space reserved where the UN was concerned!
But let me see..is the Catholic Church the sole offender here? Or even the worst one?
Islam is absolutely rotten with anti-semitism and it is religiously sanctioned in the Qu'ran, and the Hadiths. Mohammed even told his followers that 'At the Last Hour' (the Muslim equivalent of the Jude-Christian Day of Judgement)that the rocks and trees were going to call out to Muslims to come and kill the Jews that were hiding behind them. The genocidal Hamas uses that particular religious exhortation today in the Martyr's Oath which every member swears.
Nor is this just scripture or ancient history. Sharia law as well as all 4 major Islamic fiqhs (schools of jurisprudence) essentially consider Jews and Christians non-people with their right to life dependent of the whim of Muslims who rule over them.Severe persecution of Christians by Muslims is a well-documented fact in our modern world, and the silence of the majority of Muslim clerics is deafening.
Homosexuals? Don't even ask. The Qu'ran mandates that they be killed 'with cruelty'. Let alone disrespected, they're routinely hanged in Iran and many other jurisdictions under Muslim rule.
And Islam does not permit either abortion or the use of contraception either, although sharia does allow wife beating, winks at honor killings and female genital mutilation, counts a woman's testimony as worth one quarter of a man's and requires two male Muslim eyewitnesses in order to prosecute a man for rape, no matter what other evidence there is.
I could go on, but I think you get the point.
So why single out the Catholic Church? Could this be it?
Because of course, if anyone did call Islam out the way this UN committee just called out the Catholic Church...there could be unpleasant consequences:
The people on this committee, those whom aren't themselves Muslims or from Muslim countries are scared witless of Islam, and the Church is a far easier target. This way, they come across as properly doctrinaire, politically correct Lefties 'speaking truth to power' when all they really are is morally bankrupt cowards turning their backs on the very people this UN commission was designed to protect.
And while I'm at it, has this committee ever issued a scathing report like this on the practices of UN peacekeeping forces,particularly in Africa? Rapes, child molestation, forced prostitution in exchange for food and other humanitarian supplies and other abuses are serial in nature.
The UN's record is far worse the Catholic Church's when it comes to disciplining those under its banner and making restitution to its victims. Yet, aside from generic statements from the UN about looking into this sort of thing when it surfaces and occasionally sending the worst offenders back to their home countries, silence.
Of course, that says quite a bit in itself, doesn't it?
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