VATICAN CITY (RNS) – Recent reports of clerical sex abuse scandals in France and Germany have again shone the spotlight on the Catholic Church in Italy, which has so far avoided confronting history abusive priests in the country.
Victim advocates in Italy believe it’s time for the local church to allow a full investigation into allegations of sexual abuse by priests, but lament a ‘conspiracy of silence’ between the Catholic institution and the Italian state.
“Italy has a big problem,” Francesco Zanardi, founder of Rete L’Abuso, Italy’s largest network for victims of clergy abuse, said in an interview with Religion News Service on Monday (February 21).
In Italy, “the dynamics of stopping sexual abuse are entirely in the hands of the church,” he said, adding that “the state does not interfere.”
Zanardi, a survivor of clerical abuse himself, has accompanied more than 1,200 victims of clerical abuse through the maze of legal and canonical procedures.
Rete L’Abuso, founded in 2010, cooperates with many other similar associations around the world to promote accountability in the Catholic Church. A neat update and interactive map on its website monitors the movements of abusive priests, the security of dioceses and ongoing legal proceedings.
Sexual abuse survivor Francesco Zanardi meets the media during a news conference in Rome on February 21, 2019. Advocates for Italian clergy sex abuse victims launched a campaign on February 15, 2022 to demand an investigation into the abuse and cover-up in the Italian Catholic Church, lamenting the deference, further showed the hierarchy in Italy that has conditioned everything from criminal prosecutions to media coverage of the issue. Zanardi, founder of the advocacy group Rete L’Abuso which has worked for years to try to raise awareness of sexual abuse among clergy in Italy, is spearheading the new initiative. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, file)
Zanardi said he was doing the hard work of keeping tabs on abusive priests because no one else, church or state, had made an effort until now.
From Spain and France to Ireland and Australia, local governments have stepped up efforts with the Catholic Church to launch independent investigations into cases of clerical abuse. But the Italian government has not yet done so.
Zanardi believes there is “a tacit agreement” between the Italian Church and State, but he is not optimistic about finding real evidence of this supposed conspiracy. The proof of this incestuous relationship is found, according to Zanardi, in the way priests are treated once they are found guilty of abuse.
“Priests don’t go to jail,” he said; instead, they are sent to places across Italy where they can serve their sentence in spiritual penance. For Zanardi, these places are “a sleight of hand”, a ruse with the aim of “guaranteeing a pact between the State and the Church similar to that which existed between the State and the mafia”.
A concordat signed between the Holy See and the Italian state in 1984 is widely interpreted as allowing bishops and even priests not to testify in a criminal trial due to the secrecy of their ministry. The treaty is partly responsible for why Italian magistrates hesitate when taking on a clerical abuse case, Zanardi said.
For Mario Caligiuri, who leads Rete L’Abuso’s legal team, the concordat is only part of the problem. On the phone with RNS, he said Italian culture makes it difficult to reveal cases of office abuse.
In predominantly Catholic Italy, “there is a reality where the church has a strong influence,” he said. The statute of limitations, the lack of adequate compensation for victims of abuse and the extraordinary length of criminal trials – which can sometimes last decades – have contributed to making it extremely difficult for victims of abuse to pursue justice. of the clergy in Italy, Caligiuri noted.
More than anything, victims are often ignored in the Italian justice system, the lawyer said, and not just in cases of clerical abuse. The root of this indifference is found in “sexism and a patriarchal structure”, according to Caligiuri, which places a greater burden on victims to prove cases of abuse.
“I was ashamed to see how victims are treated” in the Italian and Vatican justice system, said Caligiuri, who has decades of experience handling abuse cases in the country.
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On February 15, Rete L’Abuso joined eight other Italian groups in calling on the Italian government to open an investigation into sexual abuse. The campaign, titled “Beyond the Great Silence”, hopes to promote awareness and action with the use of the hashtag “#ItalyChurchToo”.
In dioceses around the world that have been investigated for sexual abuse cases, the percentage of abuser priests discovered ranged from 4% to 5% – with the French report suggesting the number is closer to 7 %. These statistics could prove damning for Italy, the country with the largest number of Catholic clergy in the world, exceeding 44,000.
“We cannot ignore the structural, cultural and ecclesial differences of our country compared to others, starting with the very high number of dioceses,” Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, president of the Italian Episcopal Conference or CEI, told the daily. Italian Il Corriere. della Sera on January 30.
For this reason, Bassetti suggested the survey should take a “qualitative” approach that examines abuse prevention efforts and training not just for priests but also for lay people. Pope Francis has urged Italian bishops to address the issue of clerical abuse on several occasions, but so far they have limited themselves to opening listening centers for victims and impose a “moral obligation” to report sexual abuse to the Italian authorities.
Bassetti is due to retire this year and, as bishop of Rome, Pope Francis will personally select the head of the Italian episcopal conference. The bishops are currently divided on whether the investigation into sexual abuse should be run by the church or outsourced.
But activists are tired of waiting for the Church or the Vatican to act and think it’s high time for the Italian state to take the reins, something the United Nations also called on Italy to do so in a scathing 2019 report.
“It is inadmissible for the church to take jurisdiction from the state,” Caligiuri said, indicating that an investigation by the church would constitute a conflict of interest. Only an independent parliamentary commission can help break “this conspiracy of silence”, he insisted.
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