Volume 5, Number 41

October 4, 2002

Pro-Abortion Group Seeks to Use Clergy Scandal Against Church at UN

     (NEW YORK - C-FAM) "Catholics" for a Free Choice (CFFC) is funding a New York man's trip to a United Nations child right's meeting in Geneva next week to announce the alleged sexual abuse he suffered from a Roman Catholic priest. CFFC has reserved a conference room at the UN facilities so that Mark Furnish, 31, can publicly present his claims that a priest in the Diocese of Rochester, New York, abused him twenty years ago. Furnish is an attorney working for homosexual activist and New York State Senator Tom Duane. Furnish is active in homosexual causes.

     CFFC, a pro-abortion lobbying group, is employing its status as a UN-recognized nongovernmental organization (NGO) to gain access to official UN bodies to advance its agenda of attacking the Catholic Church. A staff member of the Committee on the Rights of the Child told the Friday Fax that CFFC will have an informal meeting with the Committee on the issue, and that CFFC has prepared an "alternative," and presumably highly critical, report on the Vatican and the sexual abuse scandal.

     The Committee on the Rights of the Child requires all nations that have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child to submit periodic reports describing their progress in implementing the Convention. When the next Holy See report is brought before the Committee, the CFFC alternative report will be discussed alongside it.

     CFFC president Francis Kissling told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle "We want to talk about the problem of clergy sexual abuse, which is a worldwide problem. We want the committee to engage the Vatican in a conversation regarding this problem and to ask the Vatican what it is doing about it." However, some UN observers question the motivation of CFFC. Dr. Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute, told the Friday Fax that "It's curious that an organization whose reason for being is to promote abortion rights would want to involve itself in this issue, which is quite distinct from it. Of course, any decent person finds clergy sex abuse repugnant. But CFFC must think that highlighting incidents of abuse will help to undermine the Holy See's authority at the UN when it speaks out against abortion."

     In April, CFFC submitted a report to the United Nations Commission on Population and Development calling for the Holy See to abandon its moral teachings on sexuality and to embrace abortion rights: "CFFC recommends a change in the policies held by the Holy See to support the use of condoms to prevent AIDS and other diseases; to approve the use of modern methods of contraception, to prevent unwanted pregnancy; and to support non-coercive, safe and legal abortion." CFFC has also spent years on its unsuccessful "See Change" campaign, an attempt to have the Holy See's status as a permanent observer state revoked at the United Nations.

     The Holy See is the name given to the government of the Catholic Church and is the name by which the Church holds a Permanent Observer seat in the UN General Assembly. The Holy See's observer status means it cannot vote but can negotiate documents. From this seat, the Holy See has led opposition in the General Assembly to make abortion a universally recognized human right and has also stopped frequent attempts to redefine the family.

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