Rome Newsroom, Jun 20, 2021 / 14:35 pm (CNA).
A group of U.N. “experts” is expected to issue a statement aimed at forcing the Holy See and the Catholic Church to surrender to abortion and gender ideology, under the guise of demanding that the Vatican takes all necessary steps to prevent abuse.
With the Human Rights Council’s latest session due to begin on June 21, experts from the U.N., including several special rapporteurs, are poised to publish a statement urging the Holy See take all the necessary measures to prevent sex abuse.
The statement, which goes beyond the capacities of the U.N. experts, has the hallmarks of an attempt to undermine Catholic doctrine by using the sex abuse scandals.
In February 2014, a report by the Committee of the U.N. Convention for the Rights of the Child waded into the Church’s teaching on human sexuality and canon law. In May 2014, a report from the Committee of the U.N. Convention against Torture tried to consider the abuse of children as torture to push the Holy See to introduce new measures.
In December 2019, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, the then U.N. Special Rapporteur on sale and sexual exploitation of children, praised Pope Francis’ decision that the pontifical secret would no longer apply in cases of accusations and trials involving abuse of minors or vulnerable persons.
But the Dutch jurist also urged the Vatican to “enforce mandatory reporting for all clergy and staff who have knowledge of these heinous acts.”
In the end, the final scope of these statements is to force the Holy See to change canon law to adapt it to a “human rights protocol” that subtly backs or mentions “gender perspective” and “sexual and reproductive rights” (that is, a push for the “right” to abortion).
In the statement, which CNA has seen in advance of publication, the “experts” refer to a letter addressed to the Holy See in April 2021, where they expressed “utmost concern about the numerous allegations around the world of sexual abuse and violence committed by members of the Catholic Church against children, and about the measures adopted by the Catholic Church to protect alleged abusers, cover up crimes, obstruct accountability of alleged abusers and evade reparations due to victims.”
The “experts” complained that the Holy See’s concordats and agreements with states “limit the ability of the civil authority to question, compel the production of documents, or prosecute people associated with the Catholic Church.”
They also asked the authorities of the Holy See “to refrain from obstructive practices and to cooperate fully with the civil, judicial, and law enforcement authorities of the countries concerned.”
The statement also targets two Catholic principles. The first is the seal of confession, which prevents priests from reporting the contents of confessions to civil authorities.
On July 1, 2019, the Apostolic Penitentiary issued a note reiterating that the seal of confession is inviolable. The note responded to the increasing attacks on the seal of confession in many countries, such as Australia and Chile.
The second principle is that of the Holy See’s sovereignty. The “experts” specifically want to see an end to the distinction between the Holy See and the Vatican City State, which ensures the protection of religious freedom, so that states can have full jurisdiction over the Catholic Church.
The letter follows up the statement of Maud de Boer-Buquicchio and will be signed by four other special rapporteurs. Special rapporteurs are part of the U.N. system. They work on a voluntary basis and are independent of any government or organization.
The April letter sent to the Holy See lists several cases: a German bishops’ conference 2018 report on abuse; a commission on abuse set up by the French bishops’ conference; the issue of residential schools in Canada, which the pope recently addressed at the end of his June 13 Angelus; a Chilean report on abuse, which lists 344 allegations; 12 allegations of abuse disclosed by the archbishop of Bogotà, Colombia, in 2019; the case of the Provolo Institute in Argentina; and also abuse cases within the Legionaries of Christ.
The letter also refers to the Holy See’s participation in the 1990 Convention for the Child’s Rights and the Convention against Torture.
The request of the experts goes, however, beyond their capacity, knowledge, or authority. The experts cannot urge a state to adopt procedures or to change its law. Nor can they question how a state is putting into action their proposals.
Figures consulted by CNA suggest that the U.N. experts are bent on using their position to “give the Holy See a pie in the face,” pushing for doctrinal changes in the Catholic Church and, at the same time, weakening the Holy See as a state and an actor in the international arena.
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We read: “In the end, the final scope of these statements is to force the Holy See to change canon law to adapt it to a ‘human rights protocol’ that subtly backs or mentions ‘gender perspective’ and ‘sexual and reproductive rights’ (that is, a push for the “right” to abortion).”
So, at the sanctimonious level of the U.N., from history what have we learned about past cliches and slogans and the “banality of evil”? How about this from Hannah Arendt, commenting on the mindset of Adolf Eichmann, the captured overseer of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jews—
“In my report of [the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem] I spoke of ‘the banality of evil.’ Behind that phrase, I held no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly aware that it went counter to our tradition of thought—literary, theological, philosophical—abut the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have learned, is something demonic; its incarnation is Satan….whose sin is pride (‘proud as Lucifer’), namely, that superbia [italics] of which only the best are capable: they don’t want to serve God but to be like Him….However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—-at least the very effective one now on trial—-WAS QUITE ORDINARY, COMMONPLACE, and something neither demonic nor monstrous.
“There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness [italics]. In the setting of Israeli court and prison procedures he functioned as well as he had functioned under the Nazi regime but, when confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless, and his CLICHE-RIDDEN language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of machine comedy. CLICHES, STOCK PHRASES, ADHERENCE TO CONVENTIONAL, STANDARDIZED CODES OF EXPRESSION AND CONDUCT [read ‘human rights protocol, gender perspective, sexual and reproductive rights’] have the socially recognized function of PROTECTING US AGAINST REALITY, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all….
“It was this ABSENCE OF THINKING—which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop [italics] and think—that awakened my interest. Is evil-doing (the sins of omission, as well as the sins of commission) possible in default or not just ‘base motives’ (as the law calls them) but of any motives whatsoever, of any particular prompting of interest or volition? Is wickedness, however we may define it, this being ‘determined to prove a villain,’ not [italics] a necessary condition for evil-doing? Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be CONNECTED WITH OUR FACULTY FOR THOUGHT.”
(Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” 1964, serialized in the New Yorker, 1971, CAPS and brackets added).
Her work is regarded as a definitive commentary on the human condition, and I submit that fewer exercises of shallow reflections on serious subjects has ever been achieved.
The eradication of conscience is a lifetime achievement, commonplace, and ultimately unremarkable. If our clergy, and prelates, and religious, with backgrounds steeped in Catholic orthodoxy can surrender their consciences over 60 million dead babies, if a pope can surrender to a mood, possibly fleeting, possibly not, capable of trivializing abortion as “an obsession,” is it not obvious that anyone can desensitize their souls and adapt them to a Satanic ontological world view of dispassionate amoral calculous and nihilistic pragmatism? Soulless callousness is a series of thousands of habituated compromises. Our friends who have become mass murderers by tolerating abortion, the same friends we might have a drink with, are still precisely that, mass murderers. The primary question we need to focus on is how have I deconstructed my soul?
Perhaps Arendt’s point about Eichmann is that one substitutes an unthinking mythology–a default slogan or cliche–for reality. And your comment supports this finding. The first lie now within the self-justifying Big Lie, as in “the woman deceived me,” or “the serpent made me do it”, or even our own so-called “arc of history.”
Even Satan does not force Catholics to surrender to sin. He knows he cannot. Satan, however, does bribe and tempt us in different ways to veer away from Jesus and his teachings.
Yes, we must prevent abuse. Abortion is a mortally damaging sin. It totally deprives young boys and girls developing in the womb – as nature demands – of living out their lives. This abuse must be stopped.
It is also an abuse to let confused people exist in that confusion. They need to be educated, to know who they really are, and not what they think they may be.
Open your eyes, you blind UN people
Sounds a lot like the EU.
Satan is definitely circling our Church…poking away, not even hiding any more. We must be strong and steadfast in our faith.
I trust the UN will also be addressing abuse issues in every organization with at least an international profile — surely all the protestant confessions, even the mainline left-wing expressions like the Anglicans, Presbyterians and the Methodists, et al. And surely they would not choose to neglect the institutionalized abuse tolerated by Islam, would they?
Then they can cast their eye upon themselves.
The UN need be abandoned by the United States and banished from our land.
Expectation of a great persecution of Catholicism was inevitable in this Age of Aquarius, UN secularist ideologues imposing their amorality upon us, “The scope is to force the Holy See to change canon law to adapt it to a human rights protocol that backs gender perspective and sexual and reproductive rights” (Gagliarducci CNA). Always pointedly explicit Andrea Gagliarducci deciphers the UN agenda. We can be assured George Soros, Bill Gates and company promote this. Fear is more whether the Church, since the 2013 trending toward secularism will find a compatibility with the globalist manifesto Fratelli Tutti. Recent indications, Vatican resistance to canonically resolve Eucharistic coherence, its recent limitations on the extraordinary rite, impending revision of Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum, its allowance of gay banners to decorate churches, tacit if not open endorsement of irregular unions, consistent, blatant skirting of the monumental moral leprosy of adult homosexuality within clerical ranks [recall what the Vatican shamefully did to Cardinal DiNardo when he attempted to address it] certainly lend to that real possibility. That is, unless Pope Francis suddenly initiates a radical reform to restore Apostolic Tradition. Who would wager their livelihood on that? Although, realistically it’s our eternal life that’s at stake. Resistance will likely become The Holy Resistance.
Since the New World order adherents are pushing for the One World government under the UN, I suspect the UN is positioning itself to do just that.
This is Catholic-bashing, pure and simple. We need to recognize and call it out for what it is.
The Vatican sold out to the UN, EU and other progressive globalist organizations. Now the pay-off … a sharp slap in the face. It’s exactly where selling out to China will eventually wind up. Will the liberal wing of the Church never learn? All the Trump-hating, conservative bashing and traditionalist put-downs didn’t win one convert. “Accompaniment” and “peripheries rhetoric” … sadly barren. But I suspect they won’t give up.
Pray most earnestly for Pope Francis conversion and for the complete failure of the UN to get what it wants….
Right from the day he was elected, Pope Francis asked us to pray for him.