Vatican official: Governments must protect family for child's rights

Published: 2007-03-27

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In order to protect the rights of children, governments need to promote and protect the family, said a top Vatican official. "It would be a new form of violence against children if the state were to impose a specific model of religious and moral convictions on children without taking into consideration the moral and religious convictions of the parents," said Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's representative to U.N. and other international organizations in Geneva. The archbishop spoke to a session of the U.N. Human Rights Council March 23. Creating the conditions for peace and economic progress helps remove situations that hurt children, he said. Violence against children in all its forms needs to be eliminated, in part by rejecting the glorification of violence in popular culture, said the archbishop. Archbishop Tomasi said that because of their vulnerability children always have been the first victims of wars and famines, and must be protected.

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