VATICAN CITY
MondayVatican
by ANDREA GAGLIARDUCCI on 29 SETTEMBRE 2014
In two moves, Pope Francis has shown he intends to strongly carry forward the line of zero tolerance on clergy sex abuse. Two very clear moves: an archbishop has been put on house arrest, another one has been removed from his post. Yet, all of this may not be sufficient to remove the prejudices against the Church for what concerns pedophilia. The Church is winning its fight against pedophilia through the work that John Paul II started, Benedict XVI carried forward and Pope Francis is continuing. But this fight risks to remain hidden, since in the end the real target of the attacks to the Church seem to be just one: to undermine the Church’s moral authority and question its sovereignty.
On September 23, it was announced that Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, the former apostolic nuncio who spent his career in Eastern Europe and that ended up as papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic, has been put under house arrest in the Vatican and will be criminally charged by a Vatican penal court, after the tribunal of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had deemed him guilty in the first stage of the process and has defrocked (laicized) him.
On September 25, the Holy See press office announced the dismissal of Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano, bishop of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. The archbishop was dismissed for “grave pastoral reasons” as a result of an Apostolic visit that Pope Francis tasked to the Spanish Cardinal Santos Avril y Castellò. The bishop of Ciudad del Este had been accused of protecting a pedophile priest.
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