Former archbishop accused of paying boys for sexual acts is discovered dead
A CATHOLIC former archbishop accused of child sex offences was found dead yesterday, the Vatican said, a month after he was admitted to hospital on the eve of his trial.
Jozef Wesolowski faced charges of paying boys for sexual acts, downloading paedophile mater ial and offending Christian morality, in the first trial of its kind to be held by the Vatican against a high-ranking Catholic official.
A former papal ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Wesolowski appeared to have died of natural causes, the Vatican said in a statement.
The 67-year-old Pole was found dead in his rooms in the papal state, where he had been under arrest since September. An autopsy was scheduled to t a ke place l at er yesterday.
Wesolowski fell ill in July and was taken to hospital the day before his trial, seen as an important test of Pope Francis’s drive to clean up the Catholic Church after child sex abuse scandals in several countries over many years.
Wesolowski served as Vatican ambassador in Santo Domingo for five years. He was recalled to Rome by the Vatican in 2013 and stripped of his duties after Dominican media said he paid boys to perform sexual acts. The accusations led to a police investigation and under canon law, he was defrocked in 2014. The Vatican rarely defrocks archbishops, so the fact the church took such action before his trial shows how seriously they took the accusations.
Had he been convicted, he could have faced between six and 10 years in jail. According to the Dominican media, Wesolowski would dress in layman’s clothes, don a baseball cap and visit a beachfront area known to be frequented by impoverished child prostitutes.
The charge sheet for his trial accused him of sexually abusing an undisclosed number of boys aged between 13 and 16, saying the abuse took place in public on at least one occasion.
Francis has promised zero tolerance of sex abuse of minors and had Church rules rewritten to allow the trial to take place.
The Pope compared the actions of those who commit such crimes to a “satanic mass”. The Vatican said the results of the autopsy would be made public as soon as possible.