A collective of nine Catholic groups has accused the Church in Italy of an “institutional failure” to deal with the crimes of clerical sexual abuse of minors. The groups, seven of which are headed by women, launched a campaign on Tuesday last week called “Beyond the Great Silence”, a title that implicitly links the Catholic Church with the Mafia, whose code of “omerta” or silence is imposed by threats of terrifying retribution on those who might be tempted to reveal their criminal activities. In an online news conference, abuse survivor Antonio Messina, 28, said he was repeatedly abused when he was a minor by an adult seminarian who went on to become a priest.
Without providing details, he said the local church authorities in his home town had tried to buy his silence. Paola Lazzarini, head of Women in the Church, called for the opening of the archives of “all dioceses, convents and monasteries”, and the uncovering of the truth, “however painful”.
The campaign aims to increase public pressure on the Church and the government for a national inquiry going back decades. It rejects assertions from some Italian Catholic leaders that the Church can do the work itself. “The Church is not able to handle this [investigation],” Messina said. “Only independent investigations have overcome the Church’s resistance to recognise its institutional failure,” said anti-abuse advocate Ludovica Eugenio. Any Italian investigation “absolutely has to be impartial,” added Francesco Zanardi, head of Rete l’Abuso (The Abuse Network).
“Beyond the Great Silence” is demanding an independent national inquiry similar to ones conducted in France and Germany. A German study, released in 2018, showed that 1,670 clergymen abused 3,677 minors from 1946 to 2014. The French investigation released last year said more than 200,000 children were abused in Catholic institutions over seven decades. Fr Hans Zollner SJ, director of the Safeguarding Institute at Rome’s Pontifical University and a member of the Vatican’s Commission for the Protection of Minors, urged Italy to follow France and other countries, which confronted the scandal with an urgency the Church had to follow.
A BBC documentary, Italy’s Hidden Sins, broadcast last week, quoted survivor Francesco Zanardi who, doing his own research, counted 163 convictions of priests in Italy in the past 15 years. He was certain this was a gross underestimate. “There’s a clear lack of will by the state to interfere with the Church, at the expense of children,” he said.
The documentary focussed on a survivor it named “Mario” who endured “16 years of horrific abuse from the age of eight, carried out by a priest named Father Gianni Bekiaris”. The BBC obtained the verdict from Bekiaris’s canon law trial in which he “admitted committing the crime” he was accused of, and it challenged Bekiaris’s superior, Bishop Ambrogio Spreafico, on why he hadn’t removed the priest from clerical orders, despite a direct plea to do so from Mario.
Bishop Spreafico insisted it was the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) that took the decisions in the case, after he referred it to them, as he was obliged to do. The CDF said that a lifetime ban on administering duties with minors imposed on Fr Bekiaris was intended to “heal and atone”, and that it could allow a priest to celebrate public Mass with minors, “as long as they are never left alone”. For Mario, the impact of this decision was “devastating”. “Towards the whole Church, from the Pope down to the last priest, I feel sickened by them. I’m sick to death,” he said. Pope Francis has expressed shame at the Church’s inability to deal with sexual abuse cases and said it must make itself a “safe home for everyone”.
Loading ...
