Did Pope Francis, in his days as a cardinal, knowingly shield clergy child abusers from justice by shuffling them from one diocese to another? In Italy and Argentina, detectives are looking into it.
Follow along with this sickening account from the Daily Beast.
Sixty-seven young boys … have been named in court documents and were allegedly abused by more than two dozen priests and brothers at the Provolo Institute [a school for the deaf in Italy], according to Verona prosecutors who have been investigating the allegations for nearly a decade and who plan to bring it to trial later this year.
The Beast recounts what happened to one boy, Giuseppe, who was born deaf and mute and whose parents surrendered him to the Church-founded Provolo school.
When [Giuseppe] was 11, a monk who worked at the institute as an educator started teaching “special secret signs” for things like masturbation, fellatio, penis, and anus. “I didn’t understand at first just why this man was teaching me these strange secret signs,” Giuseppe explained in an exclusive, and very emotional, interview in Rome. “Then one day it became very clear when one of the priests made the secret sign for fellatio when we were alone, which was followed by him pushing his erect penis into my mouth.”
From that point on, Giuseppe said through his interpreter — often using fast and somewhat violent sign language as tears ran down his face — priests and the brothers would give a sign to the young boys and then take them to special rooms Giuseppe says were used for “time out” punishments or as resting areas. He said that because everyone was deaf at the school except those who worked there, no one could hear the screams and cries of the young boys when the abuse took place.
Giuseppe said that on several occasions he and others tried to write down what was happening, but because their letters and notes were given to the priests and brothers to be mailed…
… those missives never made it out.
For Giuseppe, the abuse continued until he was 18 and he could finally choose to leave. Meanwhile, dozens of other children at the Provolo Institute were treated to the same abuse.
