An Italian priest who served as a diplomat in the Holy See's Washington Embassy has been sentenced to jail for five years by a Vatican court for downloading and sharing child pornography |
A Vatican court on Saturday jailed for five years an Italian priest who worked as a diplomat for the Holy See's Washington embassy, for possessing and sharing child pornography.
Monsignor
Carlo Alberto Capella pleaded guilty on Friday, the opening day of the court
hearing, saying he had gone through a "personal crisis" and felt
"useless" as a counsellor at the embassy.
The
51-year-old told the three lay Italian judges at the tiny courtroom in the
Vatican City that he had started looking at child pornography online on Tumblr
in July 2016 and exchanged pictures with other users.
The Vatican
gendarmerie said more than 40 pornographic photos and videos, some showing
sexual contact between adults and pre-pubescent children, were found on the
priest's mobile phone.
The US
State Department had told the Vatican last August that an embassy diplomat may
have violated the law with child pornography pictures.
The Vatican
did not answer an official request to lift his diplomatic immunity, State
Department sources said, and the priest was recalled to Rome last September.
He was
placed in custody in April after an inquiry had been opened.
Canada also
issued an arrest warrant for Capella on suspicion of downloading child
pornography from inside a church in the Ontario town of Windsor.
Faced with
a growing number of cases worldwide and repeated criticism for the way the
Catholic Church has handled the scandals, Pope Francis brought in new
legislation in 2013 covering child sex abuse and pornography and sentences of
up to 12 years for priests.
In one of
the latest scandals, the Chilean church has been rocked by accusations of
wide-scale covering up of child abuse during the 1980s and 1990s.
Last
Wednesday it emerged that the former archbishop of Washington, Cardinal
Theodore McCarrick, had been removed from the ministry following allegations he
sexually abused a teenager nearly 50 years ago when he was a priest in New
York.
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