A former Vatican ambassador to the Dominican Republic has been placed under house arrest in the first case of criminal proceedings by the Holy See over the sexual abuse of children, a spokesman said on Tuesday.
Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said Pope Francis had personally ordered swift action in the case of Polish former archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, who was convicted of sex abuse by a church tribunal in June and defrocked pending further criminal proceedings.
Lombardi said the legal move was “the result of the pope’s express wish for a case this serious and sensitive to be dealt with without delay, with the necessary scrupulousness and full undertaking of responsibility on the part of the institutions which head up the Holy See.”
Italian news agency ANSA said Wesolowski was being held under house arrest in an apartment within the same building as the criminal court.
If the case goes to trial, it will be the first for sex abuse within the tiny city state.
Wesolowski’s defrocking came six months after the UN children’s rights watchdog highlighted his case as an example of the Vatican’s failure to take concrete actions to prove its commitment to stamp out the abuse of minors by priests.
The Vatican had been accused by some critics of attempting to protect Wesolowski from Dominican jurisdiction by recalling him to Rome.
Wesolowski, 65, had been ambassador to the Dominican Republic since 2008, but was recalled by Pope Francis in August last year following accusations of sexually abusing minors.
He was ordained in 1972 by then-archbishop of Krakow Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who later became pope John Paul II and was elevated to sainthood this year.
The late pontiff named Wesolowski the Vatican’s envoy to Bolivia. He was later posted to several Asian countries before being dispatched to the Dominican Republic in 2008 by then-pope Benedict XVI.
Press reports last year linked him with another Polish priest, Wojciech Gil, accused of raping boys while serving on the Caribbean island.
The Church has faced a decade-long series of scandals over abuse by priests and lay officials, from Ireland to the US and Australia.
It was fiercely condemned by the UN in January for failing to stamp out child abuse and allowing systematic cover-ups by simply moving around clergy suspected of raping or molesting children.
Francis has vowed to crack down on abuse in the Catholic Church, reiterating the zero-tolerance approach of his predecessor.
Last year, he overhauled Vatican law, issuing a special decree declaring that sexual violence and sexual acts with children, child prostitution and child pornography were punishable by up to 12 years in prison.
In May he warned there were “no privileges” for bishops when it came to child sex crimes and likened sexual abuse to a “Satanic mass.”
At a UN hearing earlier this year, Vatican officials said that 3,420 abuse cases had been handled over the past decade by the Catholic Church’s Canon Law prosecutors.
As a result of these cases, 848 priests were defrocked while a further 2,572 were ordered to “live a life of prayer or penance,” for example in a monastery.
The Vatican says it receives about 600 claims against abusive priests every year, many dating back to the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
HELP DENIED? The US Department of State said that the Cuban leadership refuses to allow the US to provide aid to Cubans, ‘who are in desperate need of assistance’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate. Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday. Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told
RSS