SICKENING – AT 9:46 A.M. ET:   The United Nations Committee against Torture, on which the U.S. serves, is getting tough.  No, not tough with Syria, or with Iran, or with North Korea.  The target?  The Catholic Church.  This has to be read to be believed.  From Fox: 

The United Nations Committee against Torture, which requires nations to come before the panel and defend their human rights records, will put an unlikely subject on its hot seat next week when it calls in the Vatican.

The UN panel, which includes representatives from China, the U.S. and eight other nations, will meet in Geneva and call the Vatican to account for its record on torture and inhumane punishment in a procedure to be aired live on the Internet beginning Monday. It's standard procedure for all 155 nations that signed on to the committee's convention to submit a report and come before the panel, and the Vatican is both a nation-state and a signatory. Cyprus, Lithuania, Guinea, Montenegro, Sierra Leone, Thailand and Uruguay are also scheduled to appear beginning next week.

“The Holy See initiated the procedure by submitting their written report,” Felice Gaer, the U.S. representative and a vice-chair of the committee, told FoxNews.com.

At past sessions, nations that carry out or condone practices universally recognized as inhumane have been forced to defend their records. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, has called for the committee to grill the Vatican regarding longstanding allegations of sexual abuse among clergy, contending failures in the Holy See’s response to the scandal amounts to a violation of the convention.

I have no sympathy for priests who sexually abuse anyone, but please note that the Center for Constitutional Rights is a pro-Communist organization, essentially a front group.

While it is possible the panel will raise longstanding allegations of sexual abuse among clergy, the Vatican report focuses mostly on what the church has and has not done to stop other nations from carrying out human rights violations.

“The Holy See notes that in times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the pastors of the church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture," reads a passage from the Vatican's report. "Regrettable as these facts are, the church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy.”

COMMENT:  The Church is a huge institution, and it has made mistakes.  The Church just last week canonized two great men of the 20th century – John XXIII and John Paul II – who made gallant attempts to correct some of those mistakes, as well as being superb inspirational leaders. 

But the Church also does fine work around the world.  It takes care of more AIDS patients, for example, than any other institution, and its school network is one of this nation's most successful. 

All religious institutions are imperfect.  They can be centers of learning and morality, and they can also be centers of bigotry and backwardness.  But the Catholic Church seems to be a special target these days, and especially a target of the Obama administration.  I suspect this dragging of the Vatican before a ludicrous UN panel, which contains that great exemplar of human rights, China, could have been avoided had the U.S. engaged in some back-room maneuvers.  But I don't think Obama's representatives truly cared.

May 2, 2014