By Associated Press

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican is gearing up for a bruising showdown over the global priest sex abuse scandal, forced to defend itself publicly for the first time against allegations it enabled the rape of thousands of children by protecting pedophile priests and its own reputation at the expense of victims.

The Holy See on Thursday will be grilled by a U.N. committee in Geneva on its implementation of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which among other things calls for signatories to take all appropriate measures to protect children from harm and to put children’s interests above all else.

The Holy See ratified the convention in 1990 and submitted a first implementation report in 1994. But it didn’t provide progress reports for nearly a decade, and only submitted one in 2012 after coming under criticism following the 2010 explosion of child sex abuse cases in Europe and beyond.

Victims groups and human rights organizations rallied together to press the U.N. committee to challenge the Holy See on its abuse record, providing written testimony from victims and evidence outlining the global scale of the problem. Their reports cite case studies in Mexico and Britain, grand jury investigations in the U.S., and government fact-finding inquiries from Canada to Ireland to Australia that detail how Vatican policies, its culture of secrecy and fear of scandal contributed to the problem.

Their submissions reference Vatican documentation that show its officials knew about a notorious Mexican molester decades before taking action, correspondence from a Vatican cardinal praising a French bishop’s decision to protect his abusive priest, and even quotes from the former Vatican No. 2 saying bishops shouldn’t be expected to turn their priests into police.

“For too many years, survivors were the only ones speaking out about this and bearing the brunt of a lot of criticism,” said Pam Spees, a human rights attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which provided a key report to the committee. “And so this is a very important moment for many, many people who are here in Geneva and around the world who will be watching as the Holy See is called for the first time ever to actually answer questions.”

Read the full article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/vatican-facing-un-showdown-on-sex-abuse-record/2014/01/15/f388cea2-7db4-11e3-97d3-b9925ce2c57b_story.html