Catholic League president Bill Donohue responds to Amnesty International’s 2011 Annual Report where it said the Holy See “did not sufficiently comply with its international obligations relating to the protection of children”:
Amnesty International’s 2011 Annual Report lists not a single instance of a human rights violation that took place anywhere in the world in 2010 under the auspices of the Holy See, yet it still managed to condemn its human rights record. So what’s going on?
The Annual Report indicts the Holy See for “child sexual abuse committed by members of the clergy over the past decades, and of the enduring failure of the Catholic Church to address these crimes properly, [continues] to emerge in various countries.” (My italics.) This is ideology at work, not objective research. Coming up empty with cases of abuse that occurred last year, it decided to adopt a “look-back” strategy, one that it exclusively applied to the Catholic Church: the Annual Report on the other 156 nations details human rights violations that occurred in 2010.
Moreover, it is preposterous to hold the Vatican responsible for the behavior of priests all over the world. Moreover, the vast majority of incidents of homosexual priests who preyed on adolescents occurred between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, having nothing to do with any alleged culpability on the part of the Holy See in 2010.
Amnesty International also indicts the Church for not mandating that the civil authorities be contacted in cases of sexual abuse. But this is true of virtually every nation, so why single out the Holy See? The fact that Amnesty International condemns canon law for not honoring this mandate suggests that it has now given itself the right to police the religious prerogatives of the Catholic Church.
The Holy See should now issue a report on secular organizations which disrespect marriage and the family, listing Amnesty International’s embrace of gay marriage as Exhibit A.
