Italy’s first-ever report on Catholic clerical sexual abuse, from the diocese of Bozen-Brixen in South Tyrol, has revealed at least 67 cases of sexual abuse in the period 1964-2023.
The report, presented on Monday, found at least 59 people were abused in the period of study by 41 abusing clerics, with 16 additional cases of ambiguous or unclear detail.
In one case a priest ordained in the 1960s abused young girls for more than half a century despite a series of complaints.
“He was transferred, transferred, transferred, transferred, transferred until, almost 50 years later, someone in 2010 had the courage to remove him from pastoral work,” said Dr Ulrich Wastl, a Munich-based lawyer and chief investigator in the Bozen-Brixen study.
Despite a cascade of clerical abuse reports in the last three decades, from Ireland to the US, no such studies have been commissioned in Italy.
Unlike in other countries, the first Italian study showed a majority of those abused were women – 51 per cent – while 18 per cent of files referred clearly to males.
Some 1,000 files were viewed by investigators and, the report added, “experience shows that, beyond this, is a ‘dark field’ of cases not brought to light”.
Otherwise the Brixen-Bozen report revealed a familiar pattern of personal, systemic and institutional failure by the Catholic Church and its personnel.
Reasons for the abuse flagged by the report included the “immature sexuality” of abusing priests, taboos towards sexuality in church teaching and “a resulting helplessness and silence” towards addressing sexuality-related abuses; clericalism and fears of scandal and of “tainting” the church.
Failure to act quickly against abusing clerics, Dr Wastl said, made those responsible for intervening “dependent on the perpetrator”.
“The perpetrators are often charismatic types who know their counterparts and their vulnerabilities,” he added.
After years of denial and obfuscation, Wastl and his co-authors noted a “sincere effort” on the part of the current Brixen-Bozen bishop, Ivo Muser, towards abuse survivors, and they find “adequate procedures” to deal with abuse, saying Bishop Moser accepts his “own mistakes with no ifs or buts”.
Fr Hans Zollner, a leading expert in the field, described the report as a “very important development”.
“This is the first diocese in Italy that has done such a thorough exercise of truth about the cases of abuse,” said Fr Zollner, a Jesuit priest and professor at the Gregorian University in Rome. He said it remained to be seen whether the revelations in South Tyrol, with its strong German-language identity, would spread to the rest of Italy.
“The willingness to take on the very uncomfortable issue of child sexual abuse depends also on the willingness of society at large to be confronted with it,” he told The Irish Times. “In my view, Italian society isn’t yet ready at this point.”
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