UNITED STATES
Indian County Today Media Network
Steve Russell
8/28/14
The latest pedophile scandal involving the Roman Catholic Church raises a distressingly familiar question: is the Church fighting to end sexual abuse by its priests, or still trying to avoid responsibility? Even worse, from the Church’s perspective, the current outrage calls into question the personal ethics of Pope Francis, whose popularity with rank-and-file Catholics and with the faith community generally is in the same league with that of John XXIII or John-Paul II.
Pope Francis is popular for the excellent reason that “humble” and “frugal” have not been common words to describe those who have occupied the throne of St. Peter, and this Pope has made very public efforts to emulate the life of a carpenter’s son rather than a life of royal privilege. Still, the Pope has personal representatives and many of them are accustomed to royal privileges.
The Papal Nuncio to the Dominican Republic, Jozef Wesolowski, came to the attention of prosecutors when Nuria Piera, General Director of Cadena de Noticias (CDN), a television station owned by the principal newspaper in Santo Domingo, El Caribe, sent a camera crew to chase down rumors that the nuncio had been luring boys to the beach house (a perk of his office) to engage in sex for money. According to The New York Times, Wesolowski caught the reporters following him and quit cruising for boys on the beach. Instead, he sent a Church deacon, Francisco Reyes, to pander for His Excellency.
(A Papal Nuncio does not represent the city-state of Vatican City. He [always “he”] represents the Holy See, and its personification, the Pope. Each nuncio is personally selected by the Pope and, in Catholic countries, the nuncio is senior in diplomatic protocol to secular ambassadors. Even in non-Catholic countries, the nuncio has all the privileges and immunities of other ambassadors because the Holy See is a signatory to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.)
Reverend Mr. Reyes got arrested for solicitation of a minor on June 24, 2013. When nobody from the Church appeared promptly to bail him out, he squealed and named names of alleged child molesters in a letter written on July 2 to, among others, Cardinal Nicolas de Jesus López Rodriguez, who flew to the Vatican and presented the evidence directly to Pope Francis.
The Pope then quietly recalled his nuncio on August 21 without informing Dominican authorities of either the allegations or the recall, spiriting His Excellency Jozef Wesolowski out of the Dominican Republic just ahead of an investigation of numerous counts of child sexual abuse, which began in early September when CDN ran Ms. Piera’s reports. Only then, did the Church announce that Pope Francis had recalled his nuncio. The Vatican then invoked diplomatic immunity to keep the nuncio from being tried for his crimes in the Dominican Republic. After The New York Times reported the story in August of this year, the Vatican reversed course and stripped Wesolowski’s diplomatic immunity, but hedged the decision in a way that sends mixed messages.
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