ROME — Giuseppe recalls the day his mother betrayed him. He was 12 years old and his vicar in the southern Italian town of Salerno forced him to touch his erect penis. Giuseppe recalled the starchy black fabric of the priest’s cassock and at first he thought perhaps the priest was hiding a toy for him. Giuseppe told his mother about the priest’s penis and told her it made him feel uncomfortable. He told The Daily Beast that his mother called him a liar and punished him for “making up stories”.
It was the beginning of an abusive relationship that lasted more than four years and included coercion and rape. Giuseppe eventually ran away from home and was abused. He fell into a spiral of substance abuse that ended up in prison. Now, he is part of a group of survivors who are calling for parliament to reconsider Italy’s Catholic church.
Italy is one of the few Catholic countries in the world to have so far resisted calls to investigate credible reports of widespread clerical sexual abuse of minors. On Tuesday, a group of Catholic organizations will march on the Vatican and call on the government to conduct similar independent investigations that have lifted the veil on clerical abuse in the US, Germany and Ireland. and France. The group has named their movement Oltre il Grande Silenzio or Beyond the Great Silence and many predict that the Italian clerics may be among the worst offenders in the world, in part because of their strongholds. headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church in Rome.
According to Francesco Zanardi, a survivor from the northern town of Savona who runs the support group Rete L’Abuso or Abuse Network, the Vatican has long resisted calls to investigate the church in Italy. He launched a social media campaign called #ItalyChurchToo. He likened the Vatican’s ability to silence charges against Italian priests to the mafia’s use of omerta or the code of silence.
Zanardi sends out a daily newsletter that publishes credible allegations of abuse and news when pedophile priests are brought to justice — a rare occurrence in Italy, in part because of what Zanardi calls “the abuse intervention” of the Catholic Church in the Italian judicial system. He said that the crosses hung in all courtrooms in Italy are not a sign of faith but “a threat and a reminder that the Church is more powerful than God”.
On Friday, he will launch a database with the Left media group, which will list convicted Italian priests, criminal cases and accounts of abuse victims. This will be the first public account in the country, and he says they will start with more than 350 proven cases of abuse by priests, but have “hundreds and hundreds of victims” too scared. afraid to approach because of the influence of the church in the country. “In the absence of action by the State and the Church, it is time for a turning point,” he said. “We will be the ‘horse of Troy’‘ in a system that views institutions as defenseless against the problem of pedophile priests. “
The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
He said they were petitioning the Italian government to avoid interference from the church. “The solution cannot come from the church as it has demonstrated in sensational cases how deep the cover-up goes,” he said, referring to recent revelations that Pope Benedict XVI had Recently retired admitted he lied while attending a meeting about a pedophile priest in Germany. He says many victims of clerical abuse want to continue but the system is working against them. “It is only after a long time that you realize that other problems you have, such as alcoholism or drug addiction, are caused by that period.”
The United Nations Commission on the Rights of the Child has also spoken out in defense of the Italian church and the lack of investigation despite hundreds of complaints in a February 7 report. “The Commission is concerned about the many cases of young children. children were sexually abused by religious staff of the Catholic Church in the Member State and the number of criminal investigations and prosecutions is low,” the report states, calling on the Italian government to ” established an independent and objective investigative committee to review all cases of child sexual abuse by religious employees of the Catholic Church. ”
If the government complies, Zanardi says it will be a belated start to solving an issue he says could have saved thousands of victims. “We can never get what we lost,” he told The Daily Beast. “But we can still save innocent children from becoming angry victims.”
