UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture
By Phil Lawler | Oct 03, 2014
Suppose you were arrested and told that you’d be facing criminal charges that could lead to a 12-year prison sentence. Would you say that the police were “sheltering” you? I doubt it.
Yet a Boston Globe editorial complains that the Vatican is sheltering Jozef Wesolowski, the defrocked archbishop and former papal nuncio who now faces criminal prosecution before a Vatican tribunal.
You can argue that the Vatican should have been tougher on abusive bishops in the past, and you’d be right. You could say that in this case, the Vatican should have locked up Wesolowski as soon as he was recalled from his diplomatic assignment in the Dominican Republic, and you’d have a strong case. But now that the Vatican is doing the right thing—now that the accused former prelate is under arrest and will face criminal prosecution, it’s a strange time to register these complaints. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
“Vatican trial for abuse suspect undercuts zero-tolerance goal,” reads the Globe’s headline for the editorial. That’s a confusing statement in itself: Is the editorial suggesting that a criminal trial is a show of tolerance? And the argument that follows confuses the reader still further by Wesolowski case with the trial of Paolo Gabriele, the papal butler, on theft charges. The cases actually have very little in common, aside from the fact that they were (or in Wesolowski’s case, will be) tried before a Vatican tribunal.
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