Will Italian bishops finally lift the “omertà” on clergy sex abuse?

Tall and lean with a cigarette in his hand, Francesco Zanardi welcomes guests to his small two-room apartment in the attic of a dilapidated building in Savona, a coastal city in northern Italy.  

This is both home and office for Zanardi, who founded and continues to run Rete L’Abuso (Abuse Network), an organization dedicated to denouncing paedocriminal priests and helping abuse victims.

On the wall are photos of demonstrations against "the Church’s silence".

With a sharp gesture, he pulls up his sleeve. On his forearm, track marks, a memory of his past addiction to drugs.

"One of the fruits of rape by a priest in my youth," says Zanardi.

"Italian legal loopholes"

He is constantly publishing new articles and updating a map of abusive priests on the Rete L’Abuso website.

"In France, the Sauvé Commission estimated that there were 216,000 victims of priests in the last 70 years, but imagine Italy, with three times as many priests," he says.

Zanardi insists he "has nothing against Catholics, but against the institutional Church". 

He says "Italian legal loopholes" and deference shown to the Church in Italy means that cases of abuse are not properly reported here. But he claims there are at least 1 million victims.

The figure is striking, even if it lacks solid foundations.

Unlike the bishops in France, Germany and the United States – and more recently those in Spain –, the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) has never launched a large-scale inquiry into abuse.

The French bishops, for example, set up the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), which then published a shocking report last October that caught all the world’s attention – including that of Italian Catholics.  

"After the CIASE report, I started a petition and wrote to the president of the CEI to ask for a similar commission, but there has been no answer," says Paola Lazzarini, president of an association of Catholic women.

"Here a priest is not to be criticized"

"The bishops still think they can escape it,” says Marco Marzano, professor of sociology of organizations at the University of Bergamo and author of La Casta dei Casti.

“They take advantage of the fact that there is no real pressure," he says.

In other countries, sexual abuse has received front page and blanket news coverage, prompted media-led investigations and been met by a public outcry. But that has not happened in Italy. 

"Italian journalists are not doing their job," Zanardi says bitterly. "When they talk about the Church, it is to applaud the papacy."

Italian Church journalist Iacopo Scaramuzzi is less categorical.

"Here a priest is not to be criticized," he points out.

Bishops are rarely held accountable for abuse happening under their watch, since they are protected by the current concordat that regulates Church-State relations. 

"Ecclesiastics are not obliged to provide magistrates or other authorities with information on persons or facts of which they have knowledge because of their ministry," says Article 4 in that updated 1984 agreement.

And this made it possible, at least until recently, for bishops to continue moving abusive priests from parish to parish – a practice which Church leaders insist is now definitely over.

Making a report is not enough

"With what is happening in France and, more recently, in Spain, the Italian bishops are feeling a kind of pressure to evolve," says Vittorio Bellavite, former head of an association of progressive Catholics.

"They are increasingly isolated in the Western world," he claims.

It is understood that many Italian bishops have already agreed in principle to commission a report on Church-related pedophilia in their country.

But a source in Rome who is very much in favor of the Church in Italy doing real work on the issue insists that it is not enough just to make a report.

The Italians cannot even agree where or how to begin.

Should a report be carried out by an independent body or an internal Church investigation? Should it focus on the past or on prevention? Should there be a statistical survey? Recommendations? And can it be made public?

Italian Catholic leaders are embarrassed by such questions and few of them agreed to answer La Croix's questions.

"Numbers are of little interest to us"

In the Roman Curia, without being against the principle of a report, many believe that the French methodology is a counter-example.

"With CIASE, the French bishops shot themselves in the foot," says one curia official.

The French bishops have also been highly criticized by some in the Vatican for describing Church-related abuse as "systemic".

For the time being, the Italian bishops seem to have shelved any suggestion of following the French model of setting up an independent commission and carrying out a major statistical survey.

"Numbers are of little interest to us, except for prevention," says Archbishop Lorenzo Ghizzoni, president of the CEI's service for the protection of minors.

"We want a qualitative analysis, not quantitative, to know our strengths and weaknesses," he told La Croix.

Instead, current CEI officials propose to conduct a survey over a relatively limited period of time (the past two decades), which would be based on diocesan archives.

"Fear of the avalanche"

But Italians who want an independent and multidisciplinary commission on the model of CIASE say their bishops are trying to avoid revelations with shocking figures.

"The bishops are afraid of the avalanche," grumbles Paola Lazzarini of the Catholic women's association.

"They want to be satisfied with a mea culpa that does not speak of the victims," complains Zanardi.

The founder of Rete L’Abuso says the "only way" that’s acceptable is to set up a parliamentary commission of inquiry and give it unfettered access to diocesan and CEI archives, something he believes is not likely to happen.

Vittorio Bellavite of the progressive Catholics has a very clear program, which he believes the bishops should follow. 

"Shed light on the past, carry out a collective act of repentance and recognize the wrongs suffered. We must have the courage to say 'we have failed, the Church has failed'," he says.

But as in Spain, where the bishops changed tack in just a few weeks, the situation could change quickly in Italy.

"All options are on the table," according to a source in Rome.

"The choice will now depend on the election of new leaders for the Italian bishops’ conference in May," he points out.

And Pope Francis will play a decisive role in how that all plays out.

The bishops will vote for the CEI’s next president. And once they’ve done so, they will send the pope a terna of the top three vote-getters.

It will then be up to him to make the final choice.