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Repubblica — 24 gennaio 2009 pagina 39 sezione: CULTURA
Le voci dall' inferno sono innumerevoli. «Accadde quando il sacerdote J. era chierichetto. Un giorno, dopo la messa, il prete si mise davanti a J. con il pene eretto e guidò le sue mani fino a raggiungere l' orgasmo~ Quando entri in sacrestia, dopo aver servito messa, padre Bill ti dice che hai fatto un buon lavoro e tu sei felice e orgoglioso. Il tuo prete ti offre di aiutarti a sfilare la veste, scherzando. Ma appena l' ha sollevata, padre Bill la spinge sulla tua faccia con una mano mentre con l' altra si sbottona i pantaloni e si spinge dentro di te~ Andai su e c' era il buon padre Donald, fumammo insieme (dell' erba) e poi mi fece delle proposte.
[translation]
IMPURE ACTS: THOSE ABUSES IN THE WORLD OF THE CHURCH
The voices from hell are innumerable. It happened when the priest J. was an altar boy. One day, after Mass, the priest stood in front of J. with his erect penis and drove his hands until he reached an orgasm When you enter in a sacristy, after having served Mass, Father Bill tells you did a good job and you are happy and proud. Your priest offers his help to take off your frock, joking. But as soon he has raised it, Father Bill pushes it onto your face with one hand while with the other hand he unbuttons his trousers and pushes into you. I went upstairs and there was the good Father Donald, we smoke some grass together and then he makes some sexual advances. It was the first time someone satisfied me sexually and I liked it very much. Twelve-year-old Julian was sexually abused for three years by Father Scott, who had told him that in order to receive Confirmation he had to attend special consulting sessions. When he was 5-years-old X the priest (who had been invited as a guest by his parents) carried him from
his bed to a settee where he was made to lay over the priest My most terrible remembrances are related to the two of us, Father Larry and myself, having sex in my room and afterward walking downstairs and have dinner with my family. The church where I was raped was the same in which the priests listened to confessions, it was the church in which all my siblings were married and some nephews were baptized and where my parents are buried?. The panorama is devastating. When Pope Ratzinger last April was in America the new cardinal of Boston, Sean O'Malley made him meet with a small group of victims from sexual abuses who carried a booklet containing the names of another thousand victims. One thousand. Let's try to compare that number in a diocese like Turin, Bologna, or Genoa. One thousand hidden cases, denied and then brought to light with great effort. But it's sufficient to cite the recently exploded scandal in Verona, where tens of former students in a Institute for the deaf and mute, now adult, have denounced their having been victims of systematic abuses by the clergy in the last thirty years, to show what can be hiding behind the façade of the daily normality. The statistics (like the trials) in USA are pitiless. Between 1950 and 2004 eleven thousand documented cases were registered. But all policemen know that statistics about thefts are defective, for they are only related to the cases which are reported. The same applies to sexual abuses. And that makes us reach the more realistic conclusion that between forty and fifty thousand cases of sexual abuses of minors are committed by predators wearing a frock.
The average percentage of diocesian priests involved amounts to 4.3%. In some years the ordained priests have produced an especially high quota of predators. 8% in 1963, 1966, 1970, 1974. As much as 9% in 1975. The book Atti Impuri. La piaga dellabuso sessuale nella Chiesa cattolicaeditor Raffaelo Cortina, 294 pages, 20,00 euros (In English the book is titled: Predatory Priests, Silenced Victims: The Sexual Abuse Crisis and the Catholic Church by Mary Gail Frawley - O'Dea and Virginia Goldner) is not only a description of a catastrophe which has shaken the American Catholics and led to the bankruptcy of more than one diocese for compensation money, but it's above all an analysis of that institution in which all that has
happened and a reflection upon the individuals who were the victims, mainly males in the prepuberal or postpubelar age between 11 and 17, when the psyche is more fragile. Reflections and denunciations coming from within the same Catholic Church. Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea, one of the curators of the dossier, was the only psychotherapist allowed to attend the meeting of the American bishops, when behind closed doors they discussed the sexual abuses.
Other priests and religious people have cooperated, in addition to experts about sexual problems, teachers of religion and representatives of other Christian confessions. From the dossier emerges an analysis with a multifaceted picture. The majority of those responsible of sexual abuses had no homosexual tendency, but it's the occasion which favors relationships
with males. It's not celibacy in itself as an abstension from sexual relationship to favor the pulsion towards abuse, but a conception of celibacy as an obsessively ideologized integrity and as purity vs. a sexuality deemed to be sinful or inferior. It's not so much the problem to
disobey a prohibition, but of personalities who break down because they were educated to idealize the priesthood and who can't cope with the shock of daily life. In addition to that, completely false is the idea these episodes are the fruit of the contemporary libertine spirit, given the fact that for the past eighteen centuries the Church has issued norms and sanctions to fight the phenomenon. The problem doesn't only concern the USA, but Italy, Ireland, Poland and all Christian nations in a variable measure. America is only the laboratory of a very deep research which regards the Church as a whole. The main aspect is that the victims are survivors, full of wounds, marked by the horror or the manipulation of their personality.
The Pope, high officers in the Vatican and the bishops writes the Dominican priest Thomas Doyle systematically failed to accept the victims as brothers and sisters in Christ . It's not a problem of the short meetings of the Popes with the survivors nor of some interventions
condemning the monstrousity of the abuses. The fact is that until now neither John Paul II nor Benedict XVI have cometo fully recognize the responsibilities of the ecclesiastical institution and its maneuvers to hide them. If the former archbishop of Boston, cardinal Bernard Law, who
bears the responsibility of not having immediately intervened against the predator priests, limiting himself to transfer them to another duty, is afterward assigned (by Pope Wojtyla) to be the archpriest of one of the most revered basilicas of Christianity, Santa Maria Maggiore, in order to settle the scandal of the superiors, then the set example is absolutely negative. Even more weighs the fact that the majority of the bishops haven't been able to establish a humane relationship with the victims. Too many a bishop, the Jesuit James Martin comments, have ended up giving priority to the interest of the abusers. You can see that from the escape strategies adopted by the Church when a scandal breaks out. The victim has an enormous difficulty to make himself heard, the superiors tend to be secretive and the first action is to transfer the guilty to another parish, then they accuse the media and in the end they think that through compensation money they can stop the episode, trying to concentrate the attention upon the wounded Church. In such a way the center of the attention remains the institution and not the victim. The abuses instead pose some fundamental questions. Is the Church ready to train priests willing to grow with their community, to listen to it, to consider themselves guides who are learning and stopping to represent themselves in the super-sacralized version of
another Christ? The shepherd who is not nourished, underline the Anglican pastor Anne Richardson, is going to devour the sheep.
by MARCO POLITI