THAILAND
UCA News
Fr Michael Kelly, Bangkok International July 2, 2014
It’s been a big week for the clergy and their dealings with the police across the world. In legal matters in countries covering four continents – India, the Dominican Republic, Italy and Australia – clerics are being held to account by police and civil courts.
Two priests in India have been charged with murdering the rector of a seminary in Karnataka, in southwest India; a former papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic has been defrocked by the Vatican for child abuse and will face criminal charges; a bishop in Australia has been charged with sexually abusing an adolescent 45 years ago, and a priest in Sicily has been charged with seeking sexual favors from refugees he was supposed to be helping.
Significantly, the Vatican’s Polish-born former nuncio to the Dominican Republic, Josef Wesolowski, was canonically convicted in record time last Friday. He has two months to lodge an appeal against the conviction but has still to face criminal charges that carry a jail sentence.
And in Australia, where a currently serving bishop has stepped aside after he was charged on Monday with allegedly abusing an adolescent in 1969, another senior cleric will face charges following a detailed inquiry into clerical sexual abuse over many decades in the Diocese of Maitland Newcastle.
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