The Vatican has placed its former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Jozef Wesolowski, under house arrest on charges of sexually abusing children.<\/p>\n
The former archbishop was defrocked in June after a Church tribunal found him guilty of abusing Dominican boys.<\/p>\n
He will now be tried by a Vatican criminal court, becoming its highest official to face abuse charges there.<\/p>\n
Wesolowski, who is originally from Poland, served as a papal envoy to the Dominican Republic for five years.<\/p>\n
A Vatican spokesman said the arrest reflected Pope Francis’s wish “that such a grave and delicate case be handled without delay, with the just and necessary rigour”.<\/p>\n
Pope Francis has pledged a crackdown on clerics and employees of the Church who exploit minors, comparing their actions to a “satanic mass”.<\/p>\n
Last year, he strengthened the Vatican’s laws against child abuse.<\/p>\n
The Vatican spokesman said the decision to place Wesolowski under house arrest, rather than hold him in a police cell, was taken on account of his health.<\/p>\n
Wesolowski is expected to go on trial later this year.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Vatican has placed its former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Jozef Wesolowski, under house arrest on charges of sexually abusing children. The former archbishop was defrocked in June after a Church tribunal found him guilty of abusing Dominican boys. He will now be tried by a Vatican criminal court, becoming its highest official to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":50521,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-50520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}