Archbishop Given Trotsky Treatment in Vatican Photo after Abuse Claims

The Telegraph
January 20, 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10584681/Archbishop-given-Trotsky-treatment-in-Vatican-photo-after-abuse-claims.html

Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski (ringed, left) appears to have been 'purged' from a photograph of members of the bishops’ conference in the Dominican Repulbic Photo: CONFERENCIA DEL EPISCOPADO DOMINICANO

It is the sort of practice normally expected of paranoid regimes such as North Korea, Mao's China or the former Soviet Union, but a disgraced Polish archbishop who is being investigated for child sex abuse has been subjected to a Trotsky-style rubbing out in an official Catholic Church photo.

Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski served as a papal envoy in the Dominican Republic but was recalled to Rome last year amid claims that he sexually abused a number of children in the slums of Santo Domingo, the capital.

He appears to have been “purged” from a photograph of members of the bishops’ conference of the Caribbean country.

In the original picture, he appears smiling in the second row, wearing a dog collar, black vestments and a heavy crucifix.

But in the re-touched photograph, his head has been replaced by that of an emeritus bishop, Francisco Jose Arnaiz.

The doctored photograph was later removed from the website of the bishops’ conference when the digital retouching was noticed by a local newspaper, La Opinion.

Vatican officials were questioned about Archbishop Wesolowski during an unprecedented grilling in front of a United Nations committee on the rights of the child in Geneva last week.

They said the former nuncio, the Vatican’s equivalent of a foreign ambassador, was being investigated.

He was dismissed from his post and recalled to Rome last August but has not been seen since.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's UN ambassador in Geneva, avoided questions over whether Archbishop Wesolowski would be turned over to secular authorities for prosecution.

He said the Pole would instead be tried in a Vatican court.

"It will be judged with the severity that the crimes might demand," Archbishop Tomasi assured the UN committee.

During the one-day hearing in Geneva, the Vatican officials were questioned robustly about the Catholic Church’s failure to protect thousands of children who were abused by clergy, and its attempts to cover up decades of sex abuse scandals.

Archbishop Wesolowski's treatment is reminiscent of that of Leon Trotsky, the Russian Marxist revolutionary, who was removed from official photographs after being declared an enemy of the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin.