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General
view of worshippers on St Peter's Square at the Vatican, on April 27,
2014 (AFP
Photo/Vincenzo Pinto)
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Vatican
City (AFP) - 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 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."
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A picture
taken in Santo Domingo, on
August 12, 2011 shows Jozef Wesolowski
-- the Vatican's envoy to the Dominican
Republic (AFP Photo/Erika Santelices)
|
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 last August 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.
'No
privileges'
The Church
has faced a decade-long series of scandals over abuse by priests and lay
officials, from Ireland to the United States and Australia.
It was
fiercely condemned by the United Nations 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 revealed 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 around 600 claims against abusive priests every year, many
dating back to the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
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