Vatican’s UN envoy says bishop’s defrocking shows church takes abuse seriously

By Josephine Mckenna
WashingtPost
July 2, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/vaticans-un-envoy-says-bishops-defrocking-shows-church-takes-abuse-seriously/20

VATICAN CITY — The defrocking of a former Vatican ambassador is a “sign of the seriousness” with which Pope Francis and the Vatican are approaching the clergy sexual abuse scandal, according to the Holy See’s representative to United Nations agencies in Geneva.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi was tasked with defending the Catholic Church’s record when he presented reports to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child and the U.N. Committee Against Torture in Geneva earlier this year.

During questioning, Tomasi was asked whether the Vatican would agree to extradite Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, a Polish archbishop and papal envoy, to his native Poland after he was recalled from the Dominican Republic last September on claims of sexual abuse.

Wesolowski was defrocked last week, and Tomasi said the former nuncio was being investigated by Vatican prosecutors. Speaking in Rome this week, Tomasi said he hoped other states and institutions would now follow the approach taken by the Holy See in dealing with cases of pedophilia.