Seryo was accused of belonging to a ring of sexual predators who held positions of authority at Instituto Vicente Pallotti, a prestigious Catholic high school run by the Pallottines order in Turdera, Buenos Aires province. The existence of the ring was revealed in The Angel's Hunt (La cacería del ángel)) book published in March 2013 by Sebastián Di Silvestro.
Seryo (a pseudonym) was rector of the school from the 1970s to the 1990s, the left for Rome. He later returned to Argentina and became a high ranking member of the Pallottines.
The other members of the sex ring included the school's head of pastoral theology, a history teacher, and the school's chief of preceptors, who was also the computer teacher. Together with Seryo they allegedly subjected numerous students, many of them minors, to various kinds of psychological and sexual abuse, from molestation to attempted anal rape.
The Angel's Hunt relates a first-person account of a boy who claimed to be sexually assaulted by Seryo in the summer of 1976, while camping in a remote area during a church mission trip.
In May 2013, Carlos Zermoglio, former director of the school and father of one of the victims hand-delivered a copy of The Angel’s Hunt to the bishop of the diocese of Lomas de Zamora, Jorges Lugones, and told him the perpetrators' real names. (In the mid-1990s, Zermoglio first reported his son’s sexual abuse by the school’s then-head of pastoral theology to a Pallottine official, Father Nicolás Dreiling, and also to Cardinal Agustín Radrizzani. The abuser remained in his position.) Zermoglio maintained that some of the accused predators still frequented the school, although they were no longer employed there. Shortly after Zermoglio met with Lugones, the bishop publicly stated his support of the criminal investigation, which had just began, triggered by a complaint issued by the Pallottines.
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• The School Where the Silence Broke, by Mariana Carbajal, Página/12, 5.19.2013 [Translation]; en Español
• Criminal Accusations Reach the Office of the Bishop, by Mariana Carbajal, Página/12, 5.19.2013 [Translation]; en Español
• The Office of the Bishop Gives Full Backing to Criminal Complaint for Abuses at Religious School, La Prensa, 5.23.2013 [Translation]; en Español |
