Survivors speak out against church sex abuse scandal outside National Shrine

By Richard Reeve
ABC 7 TV
February 25, 2019

https://bit.ly/2VlDoew

Becky Ianni

Becky Ianni is a sex abuse survivor.

She says the man who molested her decades ago was a newly ordained parish priest.

“As an 8-year-old, I knew how serious this was,” she said. “I knew this was a sin, I knew it was wrong.”

Ianni, now in her 60s, says the priest was like an adopted member of her family.

He ate dinner in her home, said mass in their basement, bought her family a TV and went on vacations with them.

“I felt like we had a little bit of God in our house,” Ianni said.

But around her 8th birthday, the relationship began to take a dark turn.

“He took that love and adoration and began to abuse me,” she said. “He would rape me with his hands in the basement, and then he would go upstairs and have dinner with my family. I would have dinner with my family and think, ‘Doesn’t anybody see I’m different?’”

Ianni never told anyone.

She somehow blocked out all the horror for 42 years.

And then she remembered and told her husband.

“She would relive the event,” Dan Ianni said. “She would sit on the floor and cuddle up and hold her head, and say, 'I’m going to hell, the priest told me I was going to go to hell. I shouldn’t have told, I’m a bad girl. I’m evil.'"

On Sunday, the couple was outside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

As the Basilica bells rang out, she and other members of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, passed out leaflets, urging parishioners to take action about priest child sex abuse.

SNAP members say the abuse wasn’t confined to Catholic priests.

“I was sexually abused by a member of the Episcopal clergy in Southern New Jersey,” Eric Bonetti said. “It occurred multiple times, and it was an individual that my parents never would have suspected.”

He was 5 years old.

The priest is dead, and to this day, Bonetti has never told his parents.

“I have struggled for the following almost 50 years to deal with the aftermath of that,” he said. “For many years, I’ve dealt with anxiety and depression and used alcohol for a number of years. I’ve worked through all of those matters.”

Ianni and her SNAP colleagues say they’re none too pleased with Pope Francis’ weekend summit on preventing clergy sex abuse.

They say the pope didn’t go far enough.

“He talked about pornography,” Ianni said. “Well, child molesters are pedophiles.”

During the summit, the pope vowed to confront abusers with “the wrath of God.”

He called clergy abuse “a brazen, aggressive, and destructive evil.”

“The abuse is definite and the repentance that’s needed is also definite,” says Maryann McLean, visiting the Basilica from her home in Dover, Delaware.

She defends the Pontiff, and believes his plan to give the Bishops papal authority to take action on abuse cases will make a difference.

“It’s a first step, but it’s a needed step, and it’s a needed step now,” she says.

But survivors like Ianni say Pope Francis needs to take more direct, concrete action.

“He could fire any bishop or cardinal that covers up abuse, and that would protect children,” she says. “Instead, we’re seeing him talk about how we’re going to use penance and prayer.”

The SNAP group says the pope should demand that all records of child sex abuse in the church be turned over to authorities.

Members are also calling for all incidents to be reported to law enforcement, instead of church supervisors.

Badly needed steps, the group says, to change the culture in the Catholic church.

“He really waited way too long to have a big meeting to have everybody get together,” Dan Ianni says. “(The church) is a part of who you were. All these years later, when we needed help, we reached out to church for help or understanding, we didn’t get it.”