ABSTRACT

The Roman Catholic Church has over 300 million child members distributed across five continents. It is the biggest non-governmental organisation in the world, with services to children including over 200,000 schools as well as many welfare, shelter and health institutions. It is the only faith system in the world to have Permanent representative status at the United Nations. It was a strong supporter and early ratifier of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) and yet there is today only one serious academic study of the rights (and obligations) of children in the Catholic Church’s canon law (cf.  Children’s Rights and Obligations in the Code of Canon Law, McAleese, Brill 2019). There has never been an internal church analysis of the impact of the UNCRC on canon law and the Catholic Church has been a serious laggard in terms of honouring its obligations under the Convention.

Children’s rights in canon law cannot be hermetically sealed from the wider global context.  Most Catholic children– and millions of non-Catholic children in Catholic schools and other services, –live in jurisdictions which are members of the United Nations and which, with the exception of the United States, are all State Parties to the UNCRC. In those jurisdictions, the Church, through its schools and other services, is accountable under both national laws and the UNCRC as a service provider. It cannot ignore the rights of the child set out in the UNCRC, whether or not it is a State Party. A former Irish Attorney General observed that the Catholic Church’s canon law does not confer a right on the Church to ignore state laws or international law: “They can’t simply set them aside or apply a different standard to them from that which is generally needed to protect children.” 

Yet that is exactly what the Holy See is trying to do. Today, thirty-four years after ratifying the Convention, the Holy See has failed to subject canon law and Church teachings to scrutiny in light of the children’s rights set out in the UNCRC, as requested by the CRC and as expected by the Holy See’s State Party obligations. It has defaulted on its reporting obligations to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, making only two of seven promised reports. It has not reported to the Committee in over a decade. It has not ratified the third optional protocol to the Convention, which allows children to make a complaint to the United Nations when their rights have been violated. It has an embarrassing history of presenting seriously inaccurate information to the CRC and backtracking on its State Party obligations. Some of that story is told here.