Sinopsis knjige s sledečim indexom: priporočam v branje!

INDEX

Preface by Adriano Prosperi, historian

Introduction. Why Only Now?

1.1.1 Crimen Sollicitationes

Claudio Rendina historiographer and journalist

Eric Frattini political journalist and analyst

Ilaria Bonaccorsi medieval historian

Vania Lucia Gaito writer and journalist

Andrea Galiarducci Vatican journalist

Maurizio Turco Deputy of the Radical Party in the Democratic Party

Andrea Masini psychiatrist

Annelore Homberg psychiatrist

Massimo Fagioli psychiatrist

Federico Tulli is an Italian scientific and investigative journalist for the daily newspaper “Terra” and

‘Chiesa e pedofilia’ is his first book.

Why only now?

hierarchy, the scandal of pedophile priests has broken out in Europe as well with great

virulence. Dozens of thousands of verified victims testify an alarming vast, distressing

phenomenon. What else could we call what happened in Ireland and surfaced in 2009 at the

end of two long, very thorough government investigations?

The Ryan Report - five volumes by the Commission to Inquire into CHild Abuse,

published in May 2009 - includes the results of nine years of investigations that covered fifty

years, 1930’s thru 80’s. The Ryan Reports collects testimonies by about 2,500 victims, who are

however deemed to be 30,000, with over 100 catholic institutions involved. The offenders are

about 800, between priests and nuns, but their offenses are barred by the statute of limitations

and their names are to remain secret forever under an agreement with Dublin’s government.

Top Irish catholic church prelates have imposed an oath of secrecy over the whole period of

time subjected to the inquiry. According to investigators, the bishops knew about what was

going on in their dioceses, but had regularly covered the culprits of those violent actions by

defining them as ‘rituals’.

Also the Irish government hasn’t come of well. It has in fact been verified that the

Department of Education has either ignored or dismissed reports of child abuse, thus

showing its total indifference towards an awful condition the children were forced in. In their

reports covering the Forties, inspectors give accounts of pupils beaten up to the point of

breaking their bones, and even then no action was taken to protect them.

At the end of November 2009, a new government investigation, known as the Murphy

Report, definitely undermines the Irish church credibility. At first sight the new scandal

appears to be smaller than the one disclosed by the Ryan Report.

The government Commission in fact examines only the cases involving the Dublin

diocese, by verifying the guilt of 46 priests who abused 320 victims between 1975 and 2004.

In the following months, the pope receives the resignations of four Irish bishops, a shock for

the public opinion in deeply catholic Ireland. Some quantify possible damages to be paid to

the victims in the amount of 1.1 billion dollars, a little less than the amount of money that at

the beginning of this millennium led the US catholic church on the verge of bankruptcy

because of similar scandals. Pope Benedict XVI then begins to promise to shed light.

In the meantime, in February 2010, a “Germany” case breaks out. Forgetting numbers,

we can sum it up with the words of Trier’s bishop, Stephan Ackermann, assigned by the

German Conference of Catholic Bishops to inquire into hundreds of sexual abuses involving

March (March 16, 2010), Ackermann said:”Yes, according to what we have learned so far

there has been a cover-up. In several cases, in which there has been no real intention to clarify,

and culprits were simply moved from one place to another, we must admit there has been a

clear cover-up activity.” And that’s not all. In the following few weeks, many reports came out

about child abuse cases perpetrated in the past century by priests of the church of Rome in

Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, England. Different dioceses, but identical behavior:

code of silence by top prelates, protection of pedophiles, silence about the victims.

The phenomenon of pedophile priest crimes shouldn’t let us forget that child abuse often,

too often occur within families.

Now let’s consider Italy. According to dry numbers, investigators don’t seem to inquire a

lot into the clergy child abuse phenomenon. In the last two years, 73 were the cases of child

abuse and more than 235 were the victims of priests or religious members. The number of

alleged child rapists goes up to 130 if we consider also investigations and trials that are

currently under way.

Certainly an even worse tragedy has been hidden, as it emerges from a 2007 report by the

for the Contrast of Pedophilia and Child Pornography, a ministerial body established in 2007

that should update the data, is still being defined at the Ministry of Equal opportunities. The

that at least one out of six boys will experience some form of sexual abuse during childhood

or adolescence. However, only one out of a hundred cases will be reported, in fact over 90%

of these crimes are committed within family circles.

It is also important to remember the international, widespread phenomenon of the socalled

“sex tourism” and online child pornography: inhuman crimes that fuel other inhuman

crimes, first of all the child trafficking, which spares no population in the world.

According to the latest UN report, 2.7million people are the victims of human trafficking

in the world, 80% of them are children, and most of the latter are subjected to sexual abuse.

regular tourists visiting poor countries wanting children and young people for rape. In Kenya,

30% of pedophiles from abroad are Italians.

These dreadful numbers, data and statistics have been long denounced. Yet it is only after

the latest pedophile scandals in the Catholic Church that something new can be perceived: a

new attitude to total indignation by public opinion seems to emerge from the way the media

have reported news involving the Holy See, as well as from the strong reaction of the public

opinion. What has changed? What has, for instance, changed compared to the years between

2001 and 2006 when in the United States they began to inquire into the dimension of the

plague of pedophilia? John Jay Study’s researchers in New York, on behalf of the U.S.

Conference of Bishops, have verified that between 1950 and 2002, 4.3% of diocesan priests

living in the U.S. - that is 4329 clergy - have been accused of alleged child abuse. Four

hundred eleven more clergy added to that number in 2004. A scandal that, until 2006, cost

2.6 billion dollars paid by the U.S. churches in compensation to the victims as a result of final

judgments, but that did not raise much international attention, in any case.

And what has changed since 2008, when the news of systematic massacres - going on for

over a century mainly picking on children and women by members of the Catholic Canadian

Church with the local institutions’ code of silence and complicity - received minimal media

coverage, with only a paragraph by ANSA news agency and scattered articles limited to the

foreign affairs pages? As Canadian Prime Minister Stepher Harper admitted the day of his

formal apology, between 1890 and 1996, at least 150.000 aboriginals of the so-called First

Nations, Inuit and Metis, mainly women, were raped, brutalized, murdered and buried in

mass graves, some of which are still unknown. The Canadian Holocaust was perpetrated in

132 Indian residential schools, where aboriginal children were shut up after taken away from

their families, in compliance with the Indian Act of 1874, drafted with the contribution of a

Catholic commission. They were forced to speak only English, forget their culture and

abandon their faith and replace it with the Christian or Catholic doctrine. At least 50.000 of

them suffered physical and sexual violence, and went through electroshock and sterilization

treatments. Many of them died in consequence of all that violence. Starting in 1969, the

Indian residential schools have been progressively closed, however the last one was only closed

in 1996. And after opening an investigation, the government began to admit its responsibility,

and in September 2007, it finally decided to allocate two billion dollars in compensation to

more than 90.000 aboriginals who had reported the brutalities they had suffered. Several

thousand more cases are still being examined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a

government body established in June 2008, whose duty is to reconstruct the full history by

examining case by case.

Finally, talking about the current Pope, what has changed with respect to 2005, when very

story about a civil lawsuit in Texas against Benedict XVI, accused of conspiring to cover up

the molestation of three boys by a seminarist?

Congregation itself with regard to some serious crimes including “violating the Sixth

Commandment (you shall not commit adultery) committed by a member of the clergy on a

cardinals Joseph Ratzinger and Tarcisio Bertone, respectively Prefect and Secretary of the

appealing to President Bush, Benedict XVI was immune from suit as the head of a foreign

state, thus avoiding a trial that continues to be at a standstill. However, not even a frown or a

sign of perplexity could be registered outside of the United States.

To conclude, hundreds of thousands of verified victims, billions dollars paid for damages,

“rigged” trials have filled the reports in early 200 years. And yet one had to wait until

2009-2010 to register strong adverse reactions by the public opinion, as also proven by an

unprecedented strong attention by the media. What can justify this new trend? After all, no

new developments. For instance, what happened in the U.S. and in Ireland highlights some

gruesome resemblance. Has maybe the common mentality changed? If this is the case, can

we assume a cultural revolution is now in progress?

In order to answer all these questions, this book analyzes the history of the thought upon

which this criminal behavior was based on, and that guaranteed impunity to pedophiles. This

essay begins by analyzing the cultural roots of pedophilia, a crime that in the Western world

has been perpetrated for 2500 years, enjoying a cultural cover-up which began with Plato,

Socrates and Aristotle. A culture and a way of considering a child -that is, a human beingthat

marked twenty centuries of Catholiscism, and that in the twentieth century found new

poisonous sap in Sigmund Freud, the father of that violent, absolutely gourndless line of

thought that build up the theory abut infantile sexuality. And on and on up to to more

recently, when according to an idea flourishing in 1968, a child, after all, likes being abused

physically and psychologically by an adult. Foucault stated this, exactly when Pope John

intellectuals and politicians have turned out to be in accord with the French philosopher’s

criminal theory.

sonca in čistosti :-)

Jure