Vatican Reports To U.N. Committee on Priest Abuse; Releases New Data On Priests Defrocked

On Thursday, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's Permanent Observer to the United Nations in Geneva, made a presentation (full text) to the U.N. Committee on the Convention of the Rights of the Child. AP reports:

the Holy See was interrogated for eight hours about the scale of [clergy sex] abuse and what it was doing to prevent it.

Vatican Radio, on Thursday interviewed  Bishop Charles Scicluna about the U.N. hearing. Scicluna described the hearing as "grueling," but said:

I think that we put out in a very clear, coherent way to the international community that the Holy See “gets it”....

Meanwhile, AP reported yesterday that in an annual report just released, the Vatican says that Pope Benedict XVI defrocked 260 priests in 2011 and 124 in 2012 in the Church's reaction to clergy sex abuse. Responding yesterday to the newly disclosed numbers, SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests) issued a press release criticizing the Vatican, saying: "The Vatican's focus should be on prevention, not on damage control on the tail end after a priest, nun, seminarian, brother or bishop has already assaulted dozens of boys or girls."Abuse