Heart attack kills Vatican child abuse defendant Jozef Wesolowski

Courier-Mail (Australia)
August 29, 2015

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/world/heart-attack-kills-vatican-child-abuse-defendant-jozef-wesolowski/story-fnihsmjt-1227504497548

Taken ill ... former Polish archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, who would have been the first high-ranking church official to go on trial on paedophile charges, died from a heart attack at the Vatican.

Alleged sex abuser ... Archbishop Josef Wesolowski, former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, leads a Mass in Santo Domingo in 2013.

Benchmark ... a Vatican trial against Wesolowski was an opportunity for Pope Francis to show he’s carrying out pledges to punish high-ranking churchmen accused of sexual abuse.

THE former papal envoy to the Dominican Republic, who went on trial at the Holy See this summer for alleged sexual abuse of minors, died of a heart attack, according to initial autopsy results, the Vatican said Saturday.

A Vatican statement indicated that laboratory results, expected in coming days, could elaborate on the cause of the sudden death of Jozef Wesolowski, a 67-year-old Pole, on Thursday evening at the Vatican.

The Vatican announced the death on Friday.

After work performed so far, “and from the initial conclusions based on the macroscopic examination, a natural cause of death, due to a cardiac event, is confirmed,” said the Vatican statement.

The Vatican prosecutor’s office appointed a panel of three experts coordinated by a forensic medicine professor at Rome’s Tor Vergata University to determine the cause of death.

A Vatican trial against Wesolowski was an opportunity for Pope Francis to show he’s carrying out pledges to punish high-ranking churchmen accused of sexually abusing minors or covering up abuse.

Wesolowski never set foot in the tiny courtroom for the trial, held in the same building where he was residing. On the eve of the trial’s opening, he was hospitalised in intensive care in a Rome hospital. Citing privacy concerns, the Vatican would only say he was hospitalised for ‘‘sudden illness.”

But before the trial was adjourned indefinitely for Wesolowski’s illness, the court clerk’s reading aloud of the charges gave a vivid idea of the case’s gravity and sordidness.

Prosecutors alleged that Wesolowski “corrupted, through lewd acts, adolescents presumed to be between 13 and 16 years old, in order to carry out on them, and in their presence, sexual acts” and that at least once, the sexual abuse happened in a public place.

A Vatican spokesman, the Reverend Ciro Benedettini, said Wesolowski’s funeral will be held on Monday at the Vatican, in a chapel of a palazzo dedicated to the Holy See’s governing functions and located behind St. Peter’s Basilica. The body will then be transported to Wesolowski’s native Poland for burial, but details about that step were still being worked out, he said.

A wake was being held on Saturday in the same Vatican palazzo. The wake was open to visitors, but no cameras were being allowed, Rev Benedettini added.