Geneva: The Vatican revealed on Tuesday that over the past decade, it has defrocked 848 priests who raped or molested children and sanctioned another 2,572 with lesser penalties, providing the first ever breakdown of how it handled the more than 3,400 cases of abuse reported to the Holy See since 2004.
The Vatican’s UN ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silva-no Tomasi, released the figures during a second day of grilling by a UN committee monitoring implementation of the UN treaty against torture.
Mr Tomasi insisted that the Holy See was only obliged to abide by the torture treaty inside the tiny Vatican City State, which has a population of only a few hundred people.
But significantly, he didn’t dispute the committee’s contention that sexual violence against children can be considered torture.
Mr Tomasi also provided statistics about how the Holy See has adjudicated sex abuse cases for the past decade. Legal experts have said that classifying sexual abuse as torture could expose the Catholic Church to a wave of lawsuits since torture cases in much of the world don’t car-ry statutes of limitations.
