UNITED STATES
Open Tabernacle
September 16, 2017
By Betty Clermont
Yesterday, the AP reported: “A high-ranking priest working in the Vatican’s embassy in Washington has been recalled after U.S. prosecutors asked for him to be charged there and face trial in a child pornography investigation, Vatican and U.S. officials said Friday.
“The Vatican declined to identify the priest, but said he was currently in Vatican City and that Vatican prosecutors had launched their own probe and sought evidence from the U.S. The State Department said it had asked the Vatican to lift the official’s diplomatic immunity on Aug. 21, and said the request was denied three days later. For the State Department to make such a request, its lawyers would have needed to be convinced that there was reasonable cause for criminal prosecution.”
All the reports that I’ve read got the above facts correct. But all the reports whitewashed the case of another Vatican diplomat, Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, and Pope Francis’ lack of response to clerical sex abuse.
A “dossier” accusing papal nuncio (ambassador) Wesolowski of sex abuse of minors was sent to Pope Francis in July 2013 by Santo Domingo Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez. The pope found the information credible enough to dismiss Wesolowski from the Dominican Republic on Aug. 21 via confidential letter.
Neither the civil authorities nor the public knew about Wesolowski until a local TV program did an expose’ on Aug. 31. The result of a year-long investigation, the broadcast contained testimony that the archbishop solicited sex for money from Santo Domingo’s poorest boys.
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