Priests guilty of abusing deaf children at school
MENDOZA (AP):
TWO PRIESTS were found guilty on Monday of sexually abusing deaf children at a Catholic-run school in Argentina, a case that has shaken the church in Pope Francis’s homeland.
A three-judge panel in the city of Mendoza sentenced the Rev Nicola Corradi to 42 years in prison and the Rev Horacio Corbacho to 45 years for abusing children at the Antonio Provolo Institute for Deaf and Hearing Impaired Children in Lujan de Cuyo, a municipality in northwestern Argentina.
Corradi, an 83-year-old Italian, and Corbacho, a 59-year-old Argentine, were arrested in 2016.
The court also sentenced gardener Armando Gómez to 18 years in prison. The victims are 10 former students.
The accused declined to make statements ahead of the judges’ ruling. They appeared sombre as they arrived in the courtroom, with Corradi in a wheelchair, his gaze fixed on the ground.
The case has shocked Argentines – as did the revelation that Corradi had been previously accused of similar offences at a sister agency, the Antonio Provolo Institute in Verona, Italy, but was never charged.
The Vatican had known about Corradi since at least 2009, when the Italian Provolo students went public with tales of abuse and named names. The Vatican ordered an investigation and sanctioned four accused priests, but Corradi apparently was never sanctioned in Italy.
The defendants, who pleaded innocence, said the students’ stories were improbable.
“The Argentine court has given the traumatised children of Provolo a measure of justice that the Catholic Church failed to give them,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-founder of the online research database bishopaccountability.org, to the Associated Press.
“The horror of Provolo is twofold: the torture of the children and the Church’s failure to prevent it. We hope the prosecutors now will launch a criminal investigation of the archbishops and other church leaders who knew or should have known that the school was being run by a child molester.”
Doyle also said that “the Pope, too, must accept responsibility for the unimaginable suffering of these children. He ignored repeated warnings that Corradi was in Argentina”.
Pope Francis has not commented publicly on the case, though in 2017, the Vatican sent two Argentine priests to investigate what happened in Mendoza. Dante Simon, a judicial vicar, told The Associated Press that the “horrible” allegations are “more than plausible”. He said the pontiff expressed his sadness and told him that “he was very worried about this situation”.