Italian Catholic bishops released their first report on church abuses on Thursday, though Italy’s main group of survivors said the statement was “shamefully” inadequate because it only covered reports to church authorities over the past two years and omitted documentary research on Church archives.
The report, which found 89 possible victims and some 68 defendants, did not purport to offer an accurate or historical picture of the problem of clerical abuse in Italy. The country’s bishops never authorized such an inquiry, despite claims by survivors for a full review as other European Catholic churches have done.
Instead, the Italian bishops limited the scope of their report to evaluating the work of the “listening centers” created in the dioceses as of 2019 to receive complaints from victims. The report offers a “first picture” of the problem and the bishops plan to publish annual reports from now on, organizers said during a news conference on Thursday.
In the past two years, 89 people have filed complaints and identified 68 attackers, the report said. Most of the victims were between the ages of 15 and 18 when the abuse took place, although 16 were adults considered “vulnerable” by the Church. Most cases involved inappropriate language or behavior and touching.
The figures paled in comparison to the tally of known cases kept by Italy’s main group of survivors, Rete L’Abuso, which estimates that there are a million victims in the country, the overwhelming majority being Catholic. The group has identified some 178 accused priests, 165 priests convicted by Italian justice and some 218 new cases.
However, the data published by the Italian bishops in the last two years was significant, he said. Francesco Zanardidirector of Rete l’Abuso.
“If in two years they received 89 complaints, that implies that the problem is there and it is big,” he said in a telephone interview.
Zanardi He pointed out that an unusually high percentage of the defendants were lay workers of the Church, around 34%, compared to 66% of religious. Secular offenders often have easier access to victims in church-wide volunteer programs, where background checks are less stringent.
the monsignor Lorenzo Ghizzoniwho directs the child protection service of the italian churchsaid the numbers were significant given that the period covered included a time when the institution’s activities had been canceled or reduced due to the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19.
“These are only a few, but they are many,” especially for a newly created system for receiving complaints, he said. ghizzoni.
From the start, the scope of the report was much more limited than the revisions that Catholic leaders in many European countries have adopted to try to respond to calls for accountability for abuses within the Church.
When he announced the report in May, the president of the Italian bishops’ conference, Cardinal Matteo Zuppiinsisted that the scope of the study and the six-month window for its publication would allow the researchers to offer more “precise and verifiable” data.
Whether by government order, parliamentary inquiry, or Church initiative, reports produced in Ireland, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Portugal and France they identified systemic problems that allowed thousands of children to be abused by Catholic priests.
In France, a committee of independent experts estimated that 330,000 children were sexually abused over 70 years by some 3,000 priests and church employees, and that the crimes had been “systematically” covered up by the church hierarchy. That report and a series of revelations about high-ranking attackers have triggered a crisis of confidence in the French Catholic Church.
Zanardi alleged that the Italian report was a clear attempt to “minimize” and cover up the extent of clerical abuses in Italy. “It’s embarrassing. It’s biased and you don’t really know what it’s for,” she said.
A consortium of survivor groups have used the hashtag #ItalyChurchToo (“the Italian Church Too”) to identify why the issue remains so muted in Italy. Alliance members said the church’s retained cultural, social and political influence has made prosecutors reluctant to investigate allegations of abuses against clergymen, resulting in a lack of interest from the Italian public and a refusal by lawmakers to support parliamentary inquiries.
JFF
Catholic Church publishes report of ecclesiastical abuses in Italy