Around sixty sexual assaults committed by priests since 1964 were brought to light on Monday January 20 by an investigation carried out in a region of northern Italy, presented as the first independent study on this subject in the peninsula.
A report commissioned by the diocese of Bolzano-Bressanone
A total of 59 victims were recorded over this period within the Catholic Church in South Tyrol, a small autonomous region also called South Tyrol located near the border with Austria, according to this report commissioned by the diocese. of Bolzano-Bressanone and made public on Monday.
The investigation in this bilingual region (German and Italian), carried out by a Munich law firm, Westpfahl-Spilker-Wastl, also made it possible to determine that 51% of the victims were female and that 29 religious people had been involved. in 67 sexual assaults.
“Each case of assault is one case too many”commented the Bishop of Bolzano-Bressanone, Ivo Muser, in a press release. “My hope (…) is that this is the first step on a path that makes the Church a safe place for children, young people and vulnerable adults”.
First survey carried out in Italy
According to the authors of the report, “this is at this stage the only project aimed at completely independently reconstructing and examining sexual assault cases” in the Italian Church.“These figures show that in the past (…) the handling of sexual assault cases has been a widespread failure characterized by the inability of religious leaders to “take the measure of the pain endured by those involved”.
For example, a priest involved was only dismissed from his position in 2010 even though his attacks on young girls had been discovered in the 1960s.
The international child abuse scandal within the Catholic Church has led to investigations in the United States, Europe and Australia, demonstrating the scale of the problem. But the peninsula, where the Vatican is located and the Catholic Church is still very influential, has not undertaken similar work on a national level.
The Westpfahl-Spilker-Wastl cabinet had already established a report on the Archbishopric of Munich-Freising published in 2022, according to which at least 497 children were molested between 1945 and 2019.