Italy Grapples with Catholic Priest Sex Abuse

Up until now, the vast majority of reporting on the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clergy has been centered in English speaking nations like the USA, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Now the sex abuse bomb has landed in Italy right in the Vatican's own back yard. For far too long the Church has welded too much power and been given far too much deference by both the Italian government and the general population. Hopefully, (1) more victims will come forth and (2) the coverage of sex abuse claims will continue and will in the process convince Italians that the Church is a corrupt institution that needs to be pushed out of its position of influence. God forbid - Italians might demand the much needed house cleaning of the hierarchy. The Church hierarchy has ruined so many lives and it is beyond time that the bishops and cardinals - and yes Popes - be held accountable. The Washington Post has a story on this developing situation in Italy. Here are some highlights:

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VERONA, Italy -- It happened night after night, the deaf man said, sometimes in the priest's bedroom, sometimes in the bathroom, even in the confessional. When he was a young boy at a Catholic-run institute for the deaf, Alessandro Vantini said, priests sodomized him so relentlessly he came to feel "as if I were dead." This year, he and dozens of other former students did something highly unusual for Italy: They went public with claims they were forced to perform sex acts with priests.

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For decades, a culture of silence has surrounded priest abuse in Italy, where surveys show the church is considered one of the country's most respected institutions. Now, in the Vatican's backyard, a movement to air and root out abusive priests is slowly and fitfully taking hold.

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The numbers in Italy are still a mere trickle compared to the hundreds of cases in the court systems of the United States and Ireland. And according to the AP tally, the Italian church has so far had to pay only a few hundred thousand euros (dollars) in civil damages to the victims, compared to $2.6 billion in abuse-related costs for the American diocese or euro1.1 billion ($1.5 billion) due to victims in Ireland. However, the numbers still stand out in a country where reports of clerical sex abuse were virtually unknown a decade ago.

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The implications of priest abuse loom large in Italy: with its 50,850 priests in a nation of 60 million, Italy counts more priests than all of South America or Africa. . . . The Italian cases follow much the same pattern as the U.S. and Irish scandals: Italian prelates often preyed on poor, physically or mentally disabled, or drug-addicted youths entrusted to their care. The deaf students' speech impairments, for example, made the priests' admonition "never to tell" all the more easy to enforce.

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Breaking the conspiracy of silence, 67 former students from Verona's Antonio Provolo institute for the deaf signed a statement alleging that sexual abuse, pedophilia and corporal punishment occurred at the school from the 1950s to the 1980s at the hands of priests and brothers of the Congregation for the Company of Mary.

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In his declaration, Bisoli also accused Verona's late bishop, Monsignor Giuseppe Carraro - who is being considered for beatification - of molesting him on five separate occasions while he was a student at Provolo, which he attended from age 9 to 15. A diocesan probe cleared Carraro of sex abuse. But the investigation interviewed none of the alleged victims, limiting testimony to surviving members of the Congregation, other school personnel and their affiliates, and documentation from the Congregation and Verona diocese. The late bishop's beatification process was suspended pending the investigation, but is now going ahead to the Vatican's saint-making office.

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Advocates, however, says the diocese's investigation was fatally flawed because it didn't interview the alleged victims and only people with links to the school who may have something to hide. "If they had wanted to shed full light on it, they wouldn't have only heard from priests and lay brothers, but from the deaf as well," said Marco Lodi Rizzini, a spokesman for the victims.

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In 2002, when the abuse scandal was erupting in the United States, the No. 2 official in the Italian Bishops' Conference, Monsignor Giuseppe Betori, was quoted as saying clerical sex abuse was so limited in Italy that the conference leadership hadn't even discussed the matter.

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It seems to be the same thing seen time and time again in the USA and Ireland: the abusers are protected by their superiors and the victims are ignored as if they are worth nothing. The same old " a few bad apples" bullshit excuse that was given out in the Boston Archdiocese as all Hell broke loose in 2002. I hope that Italian citizens and the government do not accept these lies that are the Church's standard mantra. There is no sorrow on the part of the hierarchy except that they've been caught yet again.