A Brazilian Catholic Church bishop resigned on Wednesday, less than a week after a video spread on social media that featured someone, purported to be him doing the unthinkable.
Afriupdate News gathered that Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Bishop Tomé Ferreira da Silva, who oversaw a diocese in Sao Paulo state, Sao Jose do Rio Preto.
At age 60, Ferreira is 15 years shy of the normal retirement age for bishops. Since 2015, he had reportedly been investigated by the Vatican for other accusations, including allegedly ignoring reports of s3.xual abuse in his diocese.
In 2015, he was reportedly accused of taking a large amount of money from the church and giving it to his driver, with whom he allegedly had a romantic relationship.
The Vatican can sometimes take years to investigate and sanction a bishop via a thorough probe, but in this case his downfall came within days of the video surfacing.
The pope on Wednesday named as his temporary replacement Archbishop Moacir Silva of Ribeirao Preto.
His downfall is the latest of a series of bishops who have been sanctioned for having allegedly ignored credible reports of abuse by priests in their dioceses or who themselves were accused of s3.xual misconduct.
The fact that Ferreira had reportedly been previously investigated, and left in his position, matches evidence cited repeatedly by survivors of clergy s3.xual abuse that the Vatican for decades refused to take action against bishops accused of misconduct.
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