Cartoon by Tom Janssen
In the Catholic Church’s Homeland, Clerical Abuse Is Barely a Scandal
By Elisabetta Povoledo
The New York Times: SAVONA, Italy — On camping trips, Francesco Zanardi and other boys from his local parish always dreaded being called to sleep in their priest’s tent.
“We all knew what would happen to the boy in the tent,” said Mr. Zanardi, who said he was first abused by his priest at age 11.
Speaking in Savona, a port city in northwestern Italy that gave the church two popes, Mr. Zanardi, 48, said the victimization went on for years, traumatizing him and leading to a substance abuse problem.
It also led him to help found Rete L’Abuso, the first support group for clerical abuse survivors in Italy — a country that, in an added indignity, often doesn’t seem to care.
That indifference is largely due, experts say, to how tightly intertwined the Roman Catholic Church is with Italian culture and history. Even today, though the Vatican and its popes don’t wield the power they used to, parish churches and priests often play a central role in the life of a community.
Italy’s record on this issue is in the spotlight this week, with Pope Francis having convened a meeting at the Vatican meant to help church leadership remedy the scourge of abuse.
This month, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child gave Italy a failing grade on protecting minors from sexual exploitation.
In particular, the committee expressed concern “about the numerous cases of children having been sexually abused by religious personnel of the Catholic Church” and the “low number of investigations and criminal prosecutions” of those crimes.
And while other countries have taken a hard look at the problem of clerical abuse, Italy has approached it with something closer to a media blackout.
Experts consider Italy’s response to be one of the worst among Western nations, comparable to that of some African and Asian churches in which denial about clerical sex abuse is still rampant.
In Italian, “there is no corresponding word for accountability,” said the Rev. Hans Zollner, one of the Vatican’s top experts in safeguarding minors and an organizer of this week’s meeting.
“This says something,” he told reporters recently. If a word doesn’t exist, he said, “it means that in this culture there is not much reflection on this.”
In a separate interview, Father Zollner also pointed out that avoiding “brutta figura” — a bad image — ranked highly among the country’s social values.
Recognizing the problem, the Italian Bishops’ Conference is redrafting its 2014 guidelines for protecting minors. The ones currently in use, they acknowledge, are too legalistic and not sensitive to survivors.
Though the empty pews of many parishes suggest that much of Italy’s population is Catholic in name only, cultural ties to the church are still strong.
Festivities for a city’s patron saint sweep up citizens, churchgoers or not, and some 8,000 church-run oratories throughout Italy offer after-school programs and other activities for children. The heroes of two of the most popular shows on Italy’s national broadcaster are a priest and a nun >>>
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