Child Welfare Not a Priority for Catholic Church

The Vatican's Child Rights Report to the U.N. is 13 years overdue, according to this A.P. report:http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iVXpIdqtwNCWrNHwSiMtY3LCMNxAD9GVEVMO0

While you might wonder how much value should be placed on a children's rights report from an organization known to have callously disregarded said rights, you might be heartened to hear "a paragraph will be dedicated to the problem of child abuse by Catholic clergy," according to Vatican spokesman Hubertus Matheus Van Megen. Gee, a whole paragraph. Knock yourselves out, will you.

And then Van Megen told the U.N. an out-and-out lie.

"While many speak of child abuse as pedophilia, it would be more correct to speak of ephebophilia, being a homosexual attraction to adolescent males," he told the rights council, claiming critics had misrepresented the situation. "Of all priests involved in the abuses, 80-90 percent belong to this sexual orientation minority, which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the age of 11 and 17 years old."

That is a blatant lie. In the United States, at least 30% of the victims have been female, which would mean the rest of the cases could not possibly be more than 70%. I do not know the numbers, but I do know a significant amount of abuse involved children younger than 11. If that number was only 10%, we would now be down to 60%, which is statistically quite different from "80-90%."

The Vatican continues to try to frame this as a gay issue. It's not. Even when the assaults involved young seminarians, men in their late teens and early twenties, the imbalance of power is such that the real issue is abuse, not sex. It's about men in power using their authority wrongly. It's about deceit, dishonesty and an unwillingness to own responsibility for wrong-doing, while at the same time trying to present themselves as a moral authority.