VATICAN CITY
The Guardian
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome
Friday 10 July 2015
The first high-ranking Vatican official to be charged with paedophilia will face a criminal court in the Holy See on Saturday, in an unprecedented test of Pope Francis’s commitment to tackling the church’s legacy of sexual violence against children.
The trial of the former nuncio Józef Wesołowski from Poland marks the first time that the church has used the criminal justice system put in place by the Argentinian pontiff to handle cases of alleged clerical wrongdoing.
Allegations that Wesołowski paid teenage boys for sexual acts while he was the Vatican’s top diplomat in the Dominican Republic rocked the Holy See when the story broke two years ago. Wearing a baseball cap low over his head, he allegedly trawled the promenade in Santo Domingo for victims among the shoeshine boys.
“He definitely seduced me with money,” Francis Aquino Aneury told the New York Times in 2014.
Aneury said he was 14 when a man the shoeshine boys used to call “the Italian”, because he spoke Spanish with an Italian accent, offered them large sums of money in exchange for sexual acts.
“I felt very bad. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but I needed the money,” he said.
The outcome of the trial, and the way it is conducted, will either be seen as validation of the pope’s belief that the Vatican is capable of independently meting out justice against one of its own, or as confirmation of critics’ fears that the new tribunals will act as a church-sponsored shield to protect its hierarchy from other legal jurisdictions. …
Gabrielle Shaw, the chief executive of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, a British charity whose founder, Peter Saunders, sits on the pope’s abuse commission, said the trial was welcome. “Generally we would like to see theses cases handled by law enforcement [in the countries where the alleged crimes occurred], but we need to give these new procedures a go,” she said. “If he is tried and found guilty and punished, it could mark a new beginning for how the Catholic church deals with this.”
Not every victim advocacy group shares that view. David Clohessy, the executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, believes the trial is a farce. “There are thousands of child-molesting priests, nuns, brothers, and yes, archbishops,” he said. “For the Vatican at this late stage to deem one of them guilty should not be considered earth-shattering by anyone.”
Clohessy said the trial was another “attempt to handle crimes quietly and internally”. Instead, Vatican officials should have raced to the Dominican Republic and publicly declared their concerns as soon as the rumours about Wesołowski emerged.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.