VATICAN CITY — The Vatican said on Tuesday it had arrested a former archbishop accused of paying for sex with children while he was a papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic.
Jozef Wesolowski, a Pole, is under house arrest inside the city state, the Vatican said in a statement.
Wesolowski is the most prominent church figure to be arrested since Paolo Gabriele, a former papal butler convicted in 2012 of stealing and leaking private papers of former Pope Benedict XVI.
Unlike Gabriele, Wesolowski has not been detained in the Vatican prison, a couple of rooms attached to a courthouse, but put under house arrest in a Vatican apartment for medical reasons.
Wesolowski was defrocked by a Vatican tribunal earlier this year and is awaiting trial on criminal charges. He had been living freely in Rome and victims of sexual abuse had called for his arrest, expressing concern he might flee.
The Vatican said the arrest reflected the wishes of Pope Francis "that such a grave and delicate case be handled without delay, with the just and necessary rigor".
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