Vatican Puts Ex-Envoy Under House Arrest Over Child Abuse
In the first criminal trial by the Holy See over sexual abuse of children, former Vatican ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Jozef Wesolowski, was placed under house arrest Tuesday. It is the first time that a high-ranking Vatican official has faced criminal charges for sexually exploiting minors, the Associated Press reports.
Pope Francis had demanded swift action in the former Polish Archbishop's case. According to Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi, 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."
Strengthening the Vatican's laws against child abuse, the Pope has vowed to take strict actions against clerics and employees of the Church who abuse children. He compared their actions to a "satanic mass".
Jozef Wesolowski, 65, had been the papal envoy to the Dominican Republic for five years before he was recalled by the Pope last August post accusations of sexually abusing Dominican boys, BBC reports.
Wesolowski was convicted of sexual abuse and defrocked by a Church tribunal in June that imposed its toughest penalty on him under Church law - of laicization or returning to life as a layman.
Italian news agency ANSA reported that Wesolowski was being held under house arrest in an apartment in the same building as the criminal court. He will now be tried by a criminal court.
Six months before Wesolowski's defrocking, the United Nation's children's rights supervisory body had highlighted his case stating that it was an example of the Vatican's failure to take proper actions to prove that it stands by its commitment to stamp out the abuse of minors by priests, the South China Morning Post reports citing AFP.
