No one can accuse the Roman Catholic church of learning from experience. Long years after fumbling its way through handling a sexual abuse scandal in the U.S., the church finds itself in the first stages of a sexual abuse scandal in Italy. And it seems determined to follow exactly the same script that brought it so much grief in the U.S.—initial denials that abuse could possibly have occurred, laughably inadequate diocese “investigations” that concluded there was no abuse, grudging acknowledgment that some abuse occurred (but far, far less than what is alleged).

A yearlong Associated Press tally has documented 73 cases with allegations of sexual abuse by priests against minors over the past decade in Italy, with more than 235 victims. The tally was compiled from local media reports, linked to by Web sites of victims groups and blogs. Almost all the cases have come out in the seven years since the scandal about Roman Catholic priest abuse broke in the United States.

The numbers in Italy are still a mere trickle compared to the hundreds of cases in the court systems of the United States and Ireland. And according to the AP tally, the Italian church has so far had to pay only a few hundred thousand euros (dollars) in civil damages to the victims, compared to $2.6 billion in abuse-related costs for the American diocese or euro1.1 billion ($1.5 billion) due to victims in Ireland.

However, the numbers still stand out in a country where reports of clerical sex abuse were virtually unknown a decade ago. They point to an increasing willingness among the Italian public and — slowly — within the Vatican itself to look squarely at a tragedy where the reported cases may only just be the tip of the iceberg. The Italian church will not release the numbers of cases reported or of court settlements.

The implications of priest abuse loom large in Italy: with its 50,850 priests in a nation of 60 million, Italy counts more priests than all of South America or Africa. In the United States — where the Vatican counts 44,700 priests in a nation of 300 million — more than 4,000 Catholic clergy have been accused of molesting minors since 1950.

The Italian cases follow much the same pattern as the U.S. and Irish scandals: Italian prelates often preyed on poor, physically or mentally disabled, or drug-addicted youths entrusted to their care. The deaf students’ speech impairments, for example, made the priests’ admonition “never to tell” all the more easy to enforce.
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Breaking the conspiracy of silence, 67 former students from Verona’s Antonio Provolo institute for the deaf signed a statement alleging that sexual abuse, pedophilia and corporal punishment occurred at the school from the 1950s to the 1980s at the hands of priests and brothers of the Congregation for the Company of Mary.

While not all acknowledged being victims themselves, 14 of the 67 wrote sworn statements and videotaped testimony, detailing the abuse they say they suffered, some for years, at the school’s two campuses in Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet. They named 24 priests, lay religious men and religious brothers.

The AP story spells out abuse allegations by some of the former students from the Antonio Provolo institute:

It happened night after night, the deaf man said, sometimes in the priest’s bedroom, sometimes in the bathroom, even in the confessional.

When he was a young boy at a Catholic-run institute for the deaf, Alessandro Vantini said, priests sodomized him so relentlessly he came to feel “as if I were dead.” This year, he and dozens of other former students did something highly unusual for Italy: They went public with claims they were forced to perform sex acts with priests.
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“How could I tell my papa that a priest had sex with me?” Vantini, 59, told the AP one afternoon, recounting through a sign-language interpreter the abuse he said he endured. “You couldn’t tell your parents because the priests would beat you.”

Vantini named two priests and two lay brothers — three of whom are still alive — but asked that their names not be printed for fear of legal action. He spoke with the nervousness and agitation he says has accompanied him all of his life from being raped as a child by a priest.

“I suffered from depression until I was 30,” said Vantini, who attended the school from age 6 to 19. “My wife said it was good that I spoke out because it lifted this weight from my chest.”

Vantini’s one-time schoolmate, Gianni Bisoli, 60, named the same men in his written declaration and in an interview, as well as 12 other priests and brothers from the Congregation, accusing them of sodomizing him, forcing him to have oral sex and to masturbate them.

And this is the painfully familiar official response to the allegations of rampant abuse at the Antonio Provolo institute:

The current bishop of Verona, Monsignor Giuseppe Zenti, initially accused the former students of fabricating their claims in talking in January to L’Espresso, a left-leaning newsweekly. Zenti called the accusations “lies” and a stunt that was part of a long-standing real estate dispute between the Congregation and the deaf students’ association, to which the alleged victims belong.

But when one of the accused lay religious men admitted to sexual relations with students, Zenti ordered an internal investigation into the Congregation. The results found that some abuse occurred, albeit a fraction of what has been alleged.

According to the diocese probe, there were episodes of physical violence against two unnamed students between 1958 and 1965. From 1965 to 1967, two would-be priests with “sexual disorders” were kicked out; while between 1965 and 1990 a religious brother had sexual relations with an undetermined number of students, the investigation found. In all cases the accused were removed.

“There could have been some episodes, some bad apples are possible,” Carlo de’ Gresti, spokesman for the Provolo institute said in an interview at the school’s Chievo campus, where a lay staff now runs a technical school for poor teens. “It happens, even in families. That there could have been 26, 27, 25 pedophiles? There is no objective corroboration from anyone who isn’t inside the (students’) association.”

Advocates, however, says the diocese’s investigation was fatally flawed because it didn’t interview the alleged victims and only people with links to the school who may have something to hide.

The man who initially dismissed the allegations, and demonized the victims, is now the bishop of Verona. That’s par for the course. Monsignor Giuseppe Zenti will presumably continue to be the bishop of Verona till the evidence of abuse mounts up, and it becomes clear that diocese officials generally, and Monsignor Zenti personally, knew about the abuse for years. That just seems to be standard operating practice for the church.

But the real punchline here is the tale of the former bishop of Verona. Gianni Bisoli has also accused him of sexual abuse. The Vatican has conducted its usual painfully honest internal investigation — during the course of which it was naturally not considered necessary to interview any of the alleged victims — and decided not only that the former bishop is in the clear, but that there’s no reason to put his beatification on hold:

In his declaration, Bisoli also accused Verona’s late bishop, Monsignor Giuseppe Carraro — who is being considered for beatification — of molesting him on five separate occasions while he was a student at Provolo, which he attended from age 9 to 15.

A diocesan probe cleared Carraro of sex abuse. But the investigation interviewed none of the alleged victims, limiting testimony to surviving members of the Congregation, other school personnel and their affiliates, and documentation from the Congregation and Verona diocese.

The late bishop’s beatification process was suspended pending the investigation, but is now going ahead to the Vatican’s saint-making office.

This is, of course, excellent PR. Because if there’s one thing the Vatican needs more than anything else at this point, it’s a saint who can be held up as the Patron Saint of Buggery.