"Papal envoy whisked away after abuse charges emerge" by Laurie Goodstein | New York Times August 24, 2014
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — He was a familiar figure to the skinny shoeshine boys who work along the oceanfront promenade here. Wearing black track pants and a baseball cap, they say, he would stroll along in the late afternoon and bring one of them down to the rocky shoreline or to a deserted monument for a local Catholic hero.
The boys say he gave them money to perform sexual acts. They called him “the Italian” because he spoke Spanish with an Italian accent.
It was only after he was suddenly spirited out of the country, the boys say, his picture splashed all over the local news media, that they learned his real identity: Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, the Vatican’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
See: Vatican Evacuated
“He definitely seduced me with money,” said Francis Aquino Aneury, who says he was 14 when the man he met shining shoes began offering him increasingly larger sums for sexual acts. “I felt very bad. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but I needed the money.”
I'm sure it was all in good fun.
The case has sent shock waves through the Vatican and two predominantly Catholic countries that have only begun to grapple with clergy sexual abuse: the Dominican Republic and Poland, where Wesolowski was ordained by the Polish prelate who later became Pope John Paul II.
Wasn't he just sainted?
It has also created a test for Pope Francis, who has called child sexual abuse “such an ugly crime” and pledged to move the Roman Catholic Church into an era of “zero tolerance.” For priests and bishops who have violated children, he told reporters in May, “There are no privileges.”
Wesolowski has already faced the harshest penalty possible under the church’s canon law short of excommunication: On June 27, he was defrocked by the Vatican, reducing him to the status of a layman. The Vatican, which as a city state has its own judicial system, has also said that it intends to try Wesolowski on criminal charges — the first time the Vatican has held a criminal trial for sexual abuse.
But far from settling the matter, the Vatican has stirred an outcry because it helped Wesolowski avoid criminal prosecution and a possible jail sentence in the Dominican Republic.
Acting against its own guidelines for handling abuse cases, the church failed to inform the local authorities of the evidence against him, secretly recalled him to Rome last year before he could be investigated, and then invoked diplomatic immunity for Wesolowski so he could not face trial in the Dominican Republic.
Proving authority covers up, it does not admit.
The Vatican’s handling of the case underscores both the changes the church has made in dealing with sexual abuse, and what many critics call its failures.
When it comes to removing pedophiles from the priesthood, the Vatican is moving more assertively and swiftly than before. But as Wesolowski’s case suggests, the church continues to be reluctant to report people suspected of abuse to the local authorities and allow them to face justice in secular courts.
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In 2008, Wesolowski served as a ceremonial dean of the international diplomatic corps to the Dominican Republic. The posting came with a stately residence and access to a beach house.
On the waterfront, Wesolowski attempted to disguise his rank, the boys say. He drove a small SUV, they recalled, and parked it near the monument in the colonial zone, where several streets are named for archbishops.
One day last year, Nuria Piera, a prominent television journalist, received a tip that the papal nuncio drank beer many afternoons at a waterfront restaurant, then went off with young boys.
Piera sent a video crew to surreptitiously film the nuncio, she said in an interview at CDN, where she is general director. After that, Piera said, he disappeared from the waterfront.
Wesolowski then began sending a young Dominican church deacon to procure children for him, law enforcement authorities in the Dominican Republic say.
The deacon, Francisco Javier Occi Reyes, was arrested by the police on June 24, 2013, accused of solicitation of minors, and taken to jail. But no one came to bail him out, and the deacon sent an anguished letter dated July 2 to Wesolowski.
“We have offended God” and the church, the letter said, by sexually abusing children and adolescents “for crumbs of money.”
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He was also stationed in Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
Related: Two pins in South Korea show a pope doing it his way
The trip pissed me off, and it looks like they are all "doing it."
This is worse than abuse:
"Irish seek truth behind babes’ unburied bones" by Kevin Cullen | Globe Columnist August 24, 2014
TUAM, Ireland — It is only now that the macabre discovery two boys made 39 years ago has become yet another exercise in Ireland’s ongoing, agonizing confrontation with its uncomfortable past.
Yet, in a sometimes frenzied rush to now consciously confront that ugly past, the concrete chamber that Frannie Hopkins and Barry Sweeney found has been transformed, in some recent accounts, into a septic tank into which evil nuns stuffed the remains of some 800 children who died at the home for unwed mothers run by the Sisters of Bon Secours between 1925 and 1961.
During a recent reporting trip, I visited Tuam, hoping to sort out for myself and readers the facts of this strange case. It was quickly apparent that some things just didn’t add up.
For one, while it’s possible the chamber the boys found was a disused septic tank, its size makes it likely to be the final resting place of only a tiny fraction of the 796 children whose births and deaths at the home were documented by Catherine Corless, a local woman.
Corless was disturbed when she could find no record of them being buried in marked graves. She was horrified when she learned about the discovery Frannie Hopkins and Barry Sweeney made in 1975.
But she was surprised, even aghast, at the way her research, which she’d reported in the local historical journal, was sensationalized by some in the media.
While some blame the tabloids, British-inspired and often British-owned Irish versions of the London scandal sheets, a cursory review finds that headlines from outlets as varied and respected as the Washington Post, the ABC television network in Australia, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, and the New York Daily News suggested that 800 babies had been stuffed into a septic tank.
See: Ghastly Discovery in Ireland
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As the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising approaches and Ireland struggles to commemorate its revolutionary past, it is having more difficulty reconciling how the most vulnerable and marginalized members of its society were treated in institutions run by Catholic orders in the first half century of its independence.
The quick and easy answer has been to blame abusive priests, brothers, and nuns, and a hierarchy long immune to secular complaint.
And surely the cruelty doled out by these so-called religious deserves unreserved condemnation. But less easy for many Irish to acknowledge and accept is that those institutions were carrying out a collective will; that they were used as social service agencies by a government that paid them; that many Irish people shared the official view, bolstered every Sunday at Mass, that unmarried women who got pregnant were sinners deserving of communal condemnation; that the children born to unwed mothers were undeserving of basic human dignity; that nuns had more say over those children’s lives than the mothers who gave them life.
That means Israel is guilty, too.
In many cases, the frightened, usually teenage expectant mothers deposited here and at 10 other locations across Ireland were delivered to the nuns by their own families, who worried about what the neighbors and the parish priest would think.
Almost as if they were.... gasp.... Muslim!
One undeniable if disheartening explanation for the misleading, outrageous headlines is that, after years of horrific exposes about the cruelty directed at unwed mothers and their children in the backward, clerically dominated Ireland of the mid-20th century, the idea of nuns stuffing the remains of unwanted children into a septic tank didn’t seem, to many, as outrageous as it ought to have.
Mary Daly, a historian at University College Dublin, says much of the breathless reporting lacked context.
You start to read through it.
“Infant mortality rates were high everywhere in Ireland, and in institutions like these illnesses spread rapidly,” Daly said. “But I would ask, how were unwed mothers and their children treated in other countries during the same era? This attitude was not peculiar to Ireland.”
That's the excuse?
A recently ordered government inquiry into what happened at Tuam has the potential to expose not just hidden graves but unseemly truths about the adoption industry in Ireland, which landed children in Boston and beyond.
Again, it is one of the great unspokens of the propaganda pre$$.
In the rush for sensationalism, it has gone largely unnoticed that the dead babies in Tuam were never forgotten by the good, decent people of this town of 8,000. As soon as Frannie Hopkins and Barry Sweeney told everybody what they found, the local people put up a shrine in the corner of the field where the 8-foot, dull granite walls meet. For 39 years, the local people have tended to that memorial.
Catherine Corless began researching the fate of the unaccounted-for children, in part, because of a lingering guilt she harbored from her schoolgirl days. She said the nuns at the school she attended emphasized the difference of the “home” children, those who lived at the mothers and babies home, from the rest of the students, not by abusing them as much as ignoring them. They were segregated in the classroom and in the playground. The home children wore figurative scarlet letters in the form of heavy wooden clogs that announced their presence wherever they went.
Corless remains ashamed that, when she was 7, she once aped a common trick played on the home children, offering a rock wrapped in a candy wrapper to a home girl.
Whatever her motivations, the basic decency of Catherine Corless shines through this whole imbroglio....
Look, they found one decent Catholic.
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NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Pope Francis’ innocent words attempted to defy gravity, i.e., the gravitational pull towards war generated by the church’s traditional endorsement of “just war” theory — a doctrine that, from its inception 15 centuries ago, has unleashed far more wars than it has prevented or limited, the most notorious of which were unleashed against infidels. At the root of this doctrine is a lethal lie: that killing in wartime is morally different from murder in peacetime, and that the arguable “necessity” of some killing is enough to make it “licit.”
Returning to where we started, the pope was clear on this much: “I do not say bomb, make war.” If only he had followed his own cautions with the bold assertions of his predecessor, Pope Paul VI, to the United Nations: “No more war. War never again,” and then, once and for all, disowned the “just war” tradition. War needs no enabling and deserves no blessings. Next time, I hope that Pope Francis will decline to comment on whether to stop aggression and offer instead his thoughts on how we might build peace in our world....
I've put mine out there by attempting to also expose those profiting from war, but my audience nowhere near as large as the Pope's.
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