By Alvise Armellini
ROME (Reuters) -Dozens of sex abuse cases committed by members of the clergy over six decades emerged on Monday from an independent report into a northern Italian diocese that dug deeper into the past than others produced by the Italian Catholic Church.
While Italian bishops have been criticised for issuing reports on abuse limited to the 2020-2022 period, the diocese of Bolzano-Brixen investigated cases from 1964, the year in which it was established, through 2023.
Bolzano-Brixen belongs to the German-speaking province of South Tyrol, on the Austrian border, and has been more active on the issue than other Italian dioceses. In 2010, it was the first to open an office to handle reports of clerical sex abuse.
It commissioned Monday’s report from a German law firm, which produced a 631-page document based on church archives and interviews that found 67 possible abuse situations, including 53 backed by firm or plausible evidence.
It linked the cases to 41 priests, equal to 4.1% of the clergy operating in the diocese over the period. One, suspected of preying on pre-teen girls from the 1960s onwards, remained unpunished until 2010, when he was forced into retirement by the local bishop.
He did not face Italian criminal proceedings because of the statute of limitations, and the almost 50 years of impunity he enjoyed “reveal, in the opinion of the authors, all facets of the general systemic failure of the Church”, the report said.
“(We need) to take the victims seriously, to take the pain seriously, to take this terrible wound within our church and society seriously,” the bishop of Bolzano-Brixen, Ivo Muser, told reporters.
There were 75 alleged victims, including 51 females, 18 males and 6 whose gender remained unknown. Nearly all were minors, with 51% of females aged 8-14 when first abused, while half the males were just under the age of 18, the report said.
Three male victims committed suicide “decades after the (alleged) abuses”, it noted, adding that one victim had his funeral officiated by his presumed abuser, causing outrage among the faithful.
The authors, pointing out that victims often wait for decades before speaking out, said their findings had probably only uncovered the tip of an iceberg, with “a high number of hidden cases”, they said.
The global Catholic Church has been shaken for decades by scandals involving paedophile priests and the covering up of their crimes, damaging its credibility and costing it hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements.
Pope Francis has made addressing abuse by clergy a priority of his 12-year papacy, with mixed results so far.
(Reporting by Alvise Armellini, editing by Gavin Jones, Jan Harvey and Bernadette Baum)
