UNITED STATES
Barefoot and Pregnant
February 3, 2015 by Calah Alexander
On Sunday, the prosecutor general of the Holy See announced that two cases of child pornography were discovered in the Vatican last year, along with numerous instances of drug trafficking and money-laundering.
Unveiling the Vatican’s justice report, Milano stopped short of naming those accused of possessing child pornography. Holy See spokesman Federico Lombardi however identified Josef Wesolowski, a disgraced former ambassador, as one of the people facing charges.
(Read the rest here)
This is no longer shocking or even surprising news. Frankly, I’m so weary of hearing about the new and horrible crap some of those in our hierarchy pull that even my knee-jerk attempt to “find the positive” is half-hearted and cynical.
To be fair, the drug-trafficking and money-laundering might be more complex than corrupt clergy. The Vatican, as a small sovereignty, can be used as a center for international crime that might not involve the citizens or clergy of the Vatican state. In the instance of the cocaine-filled condoms, the Vatican was indeed cooperating with civil authorities in an attempt to ensnare the buyer. I have a hard time imagining that the German authorities who handed the package over to the Vatican as bait would have just shrugged and let it go if the buyer had turned out to be a Vatican priest. Nor do I believe that the Vatican would have insisted that a clear instance of international crime be left for them to handle if the perpetrator had been a clergyman.
The child porn case seems different.
For the record, the prosecutor general was not obligated to reveal the details of the investigation, nor was the spokesman obligated to reveal the name of one of the perpetrators.
This is good in the same way that it’s good when one child tells another child that he found his brother lighting kittens on fire, again. Honesty might be a virtue, but the tortured kittens need courage and justice to save them. I doubt they’ll be comforted to know that yeah, the people they trusted with their lives and souls might have tortured and mangled both body and soul, but at least they told the truth.
If this were being handled by the civil authorities, Wesolowski would be awaiting trial in a cozy jail cell. It seems that he is under house arrest rather than in the Vatican jail, since, as my colleague at the atheist channel points out that the Vatican jail has been otherwise, er, “occupied”.
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