First Vatican child abuse trial places former nuncio in dock

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/10/first-vatican-child-abuse-trial-former-nuncio-jozef-wesolowski-dock



Fate of Józef Wesołowski, accused of abusing boys in the Dominican Republic, seen as test of pope’s new approach to tackling alleged clerical wrongdoing

First Vatican child abuse trial places former nuncio in dock
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome
Friday 10 July 2015 00.00 EDT

The first high-ranking Vatican official to be charged with paedophilia will face a criminal court in the Holy See on Saturday, in an unprecedented test of Pope Francis’s commitment to tackling the church’s legacy of sexual violence against children.

The trial of the former nuncio Józef Wesołowski from Poland marks the first time that the church has used the criminal justice system put in place by the Argentinian pontiff to handle cases of alleged clerical wrongdoing.

Allegations that Wesołowski paid teenage boys for sexual acts while he was the Vatican’s top diplomat in the Dominican Republic rocked the Holy See when the story broke two years ago. Wearing a baseball cap low over his head, he allegedly trawled the promenade in Santo Domingo for victims among the shoeshine boys.

“He definitely seduced me with money,” Francis Aquino Aneury told the New York Times in 2014. Aneury said he was 14 when a man the shoeshine boys used to call “the Italian”, because he spoke Spanish with an Italian accent, offered them large sums of money in exchange for sexual acts.