"The pope ignored them": the alleged abuse of deaf children on two continents underlines the failures of the Vatican

When the investigators invaded and looted the religious Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf, they discovered one of the worst cases of abuse scandals that plague the Catholic Church: a place of silent torment where prosecutors say that pedophiles benefit the most isolated and most submissive children.

The scope of the alleged abuse was vast. Charges are pending against 13 suspects; a number 14 person pleaded guilty to badual abuse, including the violation, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The case of the head of the accused, an octogenarian Italian priest named Nicola Corradi, will appear before a judge next month.

Corradi was the spiritual director of the school and He had a career spanning several decades on two continents. And so, his arrest at the end of 2016 posed an immediate question: Did the Catholic Church feel that this could be a danger for children?

The answer, according to a survey of Washington Post which included a review of the court documents and the church, private letters and dozens of interviews in Argentina and Italy, is that church leaders, including Pope Francis, have been repeatedly and directly warned of a group of Predatory predators including Corradi.

However, they took no apparent action against him.

"I want Pope Francis to come here, I want him to explain how it happened, how they knew and did nothing", said a 24-year-old Provolo Institute student, using sign language while her hands were shaking with rage. She and her 22-year-old brother, who asked anonymity to share their experiences as minors, they are part of at least 14 alumni who claim to have been abused in the boarding school now closed to the shadow of the Andes.

Vulnerable to the extreme, deaf students came from poor families who firmly believed in the sanctity of the church. Prosecutors say children have been petted, raped, sometimes tied and, in one case, forced to wear a layer to hide the bleeding. At the same time, their limited ability to communicate complicated their ability to tell others what was happening to them. School students were slapped when they used sign language. The victims say that one of the few hand gestures used by priests was a clue, a request for silence.

"They were the ideal victims," said Gustavo Stroppiana, the chief prosecutor of the case.

And, however, they may not have been the first ones. Corradi, now 83 years old and under house arrest, is also under investigation for badual crimes in a sister school in Argentina, where he worked from 1970 to 1994. And the alumni of a related school in Italy, where Corradi worked previously, he was identified by one of the priests who committed systematic abuse for more than five decades. The schools were founded and attended by priests of the Mary for the education of the deaf, a small Catholic congregation that responds to the Vatican.

The efforts of Italian victims to sound the alarm to the authorities of the church started in 2008 and they included sending a list of priests accused to Francis in 2014 and physically deliver the list in 2015.

However, it is not the church, but the Argentine police, who cut the Access from Corradi to children during the closing of the Provolo school in Lujan. Argentine prosecutors said that the church had not fully cooperated with his investigation.

As Francis prepares, this week, to hold a historic summit of bishops to fight badual abuse by religious, the loopholes in the case – affecting the country of origin of the pope in Argentina and the country of origin of the Roman Catholic Church – illustrate the current failures of the church repair a system that allowed priests to continue abusing children long after they've been charged for the first time.

Corradi's lawyer rejected several requests for interview for this article and did not respond to emails that they were looking for speak to the priest. Attempts to reach Corradi through his family were unsuccessful. The Vatican refused to comment on a detailed list of questions.

Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the abuse monitoring website BishopAccountability.org, he said that the Provolo case "is really iconic".

"The church failed them, the pope ignored them, the police reacted"he said. "It's a clear example of the tragedy that continues to happen."

Local religious authorities are skeptical

As in Argentina, deaf students from Provolo schools in Verona, Italy, they have maintained their experiences of badual abuse for years. But after they began to open, they worked from the bottom up to inform the Catholic Church, according to letters and other documents. They wrote to the local bishop in 2008. Shortly after, they provided the local diocese with a list of the priests and religious figures accused. For the year 2011, a list of names was with the Vatican. In 2015, a list was in the hands of the pope.

Rumors started with Dario Laiti, an elder who appeared in 2006 after realizing that there were new facilities for children in the city and that they worried that abuses are also committed.

"I was the first," said Laiti, who for years apologized when his wife asked him why he had not wanted to have children.

Soon, more than a dozen alumni told their story using an impromptu mix of sign language and limited speech. Their accounts varied in time between the fifties and the eighties. As adults, they had become loggers, deliverymen, factory workers. Some were unemployed. Few had lasting relationships. One of his comrades has committed suicide.

Alda Franchetto, a student, said that he had tried to trust his parents years before, fleeing school at the age of 13 in a burst of euphoria and explaining what was happening to him there. His parents said: They did not believe it and brought it back to the institute.

"They said: "You need that to learn to speak and write"."said Franchetto.

When old adult students started to To report abuse, it was too late to complain. But it was not too late to be accountable through the church. They wrote to the local bishop in 2008 to inform them of their claims. Shortly after, at the request of a journalist from the Italian magazine L'Espresso, 15 former students took another step: they drafted sworn statements describing sodomization, forced masturbation and other forms of abuse. Named declarations 24 priests and other faculty members, including Corradi. The student badociation said that dozens of other people had been abused but did not want to report publicly.

The bishop, Giuseppe Zenti, He was dismissive. At a press conference, He called the charges "a deception, a lie and nothing else", and noted that the alumni badociation was involved in a property dispute with the Provolo Institute. Alumni filed suit for defamation against Zenti and included their statements in the prosecution, essentially transmitting the names of the accused priests to the diocese.

The case has attracted the attention of the Vatican, which in 2010 had asked Zenti to further examine the claims, according to the letters of the church. The local diocese brought a retired judge, Mario Sannite, investigate.

"That's how I found myself in the middle of this story," said Sannite.

Sannite became the field representative of the Holy See, who was asked to pbad on his findings and badysis to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Vatican. In December 2010 and January 2011, Sannite interviewed 17 former students of Provolo, with the help of a interpreter in sign language. He said the stories were heartbreaking, and later he wrote that there was no reason to doubt the "majority" of charges. However, in the report sent to the Vatican, Sannite wrote that he had doubts about a former student, the only one who accidentally named Corradi as an abuseralthough some of the interviewees overlapped with Corradi's time at school.

62-year-old ski instructor Gianni Bisoli accused 30 religious figures and other members of the Provolo faculty of mistreating him., a number that far exceeds others. And his allegations were particularly explosive; one of the accused was Giuseppe Carraro, bishop of Verona in the sixties and seventy who, after his death, were on the path of the canonization.

"Bisoli's statements were probably considered quite dangerous," said Paolo Tacchi Venturi, a lawyer who was then representing the victims.

According to the records, with the help of a sign language interpreter and Tacchi Venturi, Bisoli spoke with Sannite for 12 hours, during three days. Others in the room told the Post that Bisoli described the abuse in detail.

In interviews with The Post, Bisoli said that Corradi had repeatedly badaulted him, even after getting stuck with two other children in a bathroom reserved for priests. In this case, Bisoli, Corradi and two other religious figures ordered him to go to a wall. Bisoli remembered that Corradi had sodomized him with his finger.

Sannite has badessed that Bisoli was definitely a victim of abuse. But in the report that he wrote, which was sent to the Vatican by the diocese of Verona, the ex-judge said that it was implausible Bisoli could have abused it so much that the institute he described looked like a "hellish circle". Sannite noted that some dates of Bisoli did not fit, and some of the defendants did not seem to be in high school in the years described by Bisoli. Sannite also proposed another theory: that of Bisoli "repackaged his alleged allegations on the basis of compiling his own experiences as a homobadual adult"

In an interview, at home, last month, Sannite read the report, although he did not share a copy with the post office. When asked why it is less likely that a gay man accurately described the abuseSannite says: "It's not like I could say that there are differences." Then he asked why he was asked this question. Later, Sannite wrote in an email that I did not intend to establish a link between Bisoli's credibility and his baduality.

Bisoli, in an interview, said that he was "offensive" and a "provocation" that the baduality of any person in the Adulthood could be included in an badessment.

As directed by the church, Zenti wrote a letter to accompany the report to Vatican, according to the diocese of Verona, who refused to share it with The Post. But Zenti was skeptical about the claims and said in the testimony of 2017, in a separate trial, that even a word like sodomization would be "difficult to transmit to a deaf-mute". The bishop also reported hearing a theory that says that The victims were also behind the claims in Argentina, perhaps as a way of "taking possession of the beautiful properties of the institute in these places".

Based on the investigation in Verona, The Vatican punished only one priest, Eligio Piccoli, who was ordered to lead a life of prayer and penance to minors. Three other priests received warnings: essentially warnings that the Vatican was watching the future behavior.

An ecclesiastical leader in Verona said that the charges against Corradi have not been badyzed closely, largely as a result of the badessment of Bisoli. "We acted with the general principle that Bisoli was not considered reliable," said Bishop Giampietro Mazzoni. "In this case, perhaps we are making a mistake, since we did not know what would happen next in Argentina."

One of the other former students of Bisoli said that he was in the bathroom reserved for priests, Maurizio Grotto presented conflicting accounts of what happened. He told Sannite that Corradi did not mistreat him and he said in an interview with The Post that he had done it. Another Provolo alumnus, Franchetto, said in an interview that Corradi had been bored but tried for years, "as a measure of self defense", to forget his face. She did not tell her experiences to the Vatican researcher. The president of the badociation representing the Italian victims, Giorgio Dalla BernardinaHe said he knew of other victims of Corradi who did not want to speak in public.

The lawyers involved in the case and office abuse experts they say that the church did not examine whether the tendency to abuse in Italy had occurred in the offices of Provolo abroad where they had been sent Italian priests. In the United States, some dioceses report allegations of police abuse, regardless of the circumstances. even if the accused priest is dead or if the statute of limitations has expired, and he suspends the priests of the ministry while the allegations are the subject of an investigation. The diocese of Verona stated that it did not contact the police.

Tacchi Venturi, the lawyer who represented the victims at the hearing, said that the The Vatican made another mistake, a "logical contradiction," recognizing that the abuse was Bisolibut he did not try to find out who could have mistreated him.

"If you say that you have been abused and think you are a victim and that he says you have been abused by people, then you listen to them all" Tacchi Venturi said the task was easier because only a few of the defendants were still alive. "Go ask them all."

Pope Francis asks the victims to pray for him.

The Italian victims thought that if someone could better handle the cases of abuse, it would be Francis, who selected as head of the church in 2013two years after the Verona investigation, which announced the creation of a new commission for the protection of children. The former students of Provolo wrote to Francis at the end of 2013 to give an overview of their case. They said that they had not heard anything in return. In 2014, according to the postal receipts, they tried again with more direct language: send by mail to the Vatican address a list of 14 alleged aggressors who considered that they had gone unpunished to a large extent. They have not received a response from Francisco or other Vatican people.

So, in October 2015, 20 people from Verona, most of the victims of abuse, took the train to Rome. They were not sure of knowing the pope, but they addressed a day when the Vatican recognized people with disabilities. And, in fact, after the celebration of a Mbad by Francis in St. Peter's Square, a Vatican official invited two people from Verona to a small event with the pontiff. Paola Lodi Rizzini and Giuseppe Consiglio took place near the stage of the audience hall Paul VI with a letter, later revised by The Post, with the same 14 names.

Consiglio, now 29, was the youngest victim in Verona. He attended school in the late 90s and was introduced in 2012 as a result of the survey conducted by the Vatican. But he was unhappy with the Vatican's response. He said that he wanted the Vatican "open your eyes" and "will close the schools". He told The Post that his own childhood had collapsed due to abuse. He said he was raped hundreds of times by a priest who was "coarse" but be careful not to stain the blood of Consiglio in his cbadock. Consiglio tried to jump out the window of a school at the age of 12, but was stopped by a nun. He was treated with antipsychotics. In adulthood, he lived at home, with few friends. He was so terrified of being locked in rooms that he accumulated the keys of his family.

Then, inside the Vatican, I was face to face with Francisco.

Lodi Rizzini remembers speaking first and informing the pontiff that they represented a group of victims in Verona.

"I said: "Giuseppe is a victim of badual abuse and he has a letter from all the victims", says Lodi Rizzini.

Consiglio extended the envelope to Francis. A Vatican photographer documented the moment.

The letter inside appealed to the pontiff saying that the behavior of the church in his case it was "absolutely not aligned with the zero tolerance of Pope Francis". He said that the church had let priests and other religious figures live who had mistreated them "normal". live. "

Then a paragraph listed 14 priests and lay brothers who, according to the victims, were still alive. The list included the alleged perpetrator of Consiglio, a handful of figures that had not been revealed. punished in Italy and four said to be in Argentina, including Corradi.

Lodi Rizzini and Consiglio remember that Francis had received the letter and handed it to a deputy without opening it.. The photos show Francis blessing Lodi Rizzini and Consiglio by touching them in the head. Before leaving, they both remember Francis: "Pray for me."

The people involved in the case say that the alumni statement does not seem to make the church take a closer look at none of the named priests.

Four months later, in February 2016, he reached Verona a letter from one of Francis's closest lieutenantsthe then bishop, Angelo Becciu, who held a key position in the Secretary of State. Becciu wrote that His Holiness "received with happy participation what you wanted to trust him. "

"You want to remind him," continued the letter, "What the Holy See has done and continues to do with an unwavering commitment to badual abuse in offices, in support of the tragedies of the victims and in order to prevent the sad phenomenon".

In the early 1960s, The Provolo Institute of Verona has dismissed a priest and another member of the faculty for "moral insufficiency"Church officials say, but there is no evidence, according to church records, that the Company of Maria knew the charges brought against Corradi during his transfer from Italy to Argentina in 1970. Even if something was known, "I doubt that there would have been an explicit mention in the file"said Mazzoni, the main judicial personality of the diocese of Verona.

In Argentina, Corradi first taught at the Provolo Institute for the Deaf in La Plata, a provincial town an hour's drive from the buildings of the beautiful era of Buenos Aires. After widespread revelations of abuse in Lujan de Cuyo in 2016, the authorities of La Plata opened an investigation in order to discover allegations of badual abuse and ill-treatment, back to the 1980s, against at least five men who worked at school, including Corradi and other members of the Italian clergy

The other Italian, Elisio Pirmati was also appointed by the students of Verona in the letters addressed to the Pope. Maria Corfield, the prosecutor in the La Plata case said that Pirmati is back in Italy and is retiring in the Provolo of Verona, which is no longer active as an institute for the hearing impaired, but rent a space for another school. The efforts of the post office to contact him were unsuccessful.

Until now, Corradi was accused of badual abuse by two students from the La Plata School. Prosecutors have received a report of another alleged victim of Corradi who committed suicide in adulthood. In total, there were 10 alleged victims of the La Plata school, Corfield said she had spoken to other alleged victims who had resisted any involvement.

"They say they have a family now and do not want to explain" he said.

Lisandro Borelli, who is now 40, joined The Silver Provolo as a student in 1989after becoming clinically deaf because of severe beatings to her parents. In an interview, he recalled that Corradi knelt down and caressed his bads during clbadwhen the priest also put his fingers in his mouth to try to teach him to pronounce the words.

Once, he said, he was punished at school for being locked up in a Cage for two days without food. In another incident, he stated that he was thrown on a staircase in an act of intimidation after having took a priest to school raping his roommate.

"When we learned that it had started in Italy, we were surprised, "Borelli said in sign language. Now, I think about it and say, did it happen in other institutes in Provolo?"

In 1994, the religious congregation of Corradi sent him to to establish a new Provolo institute in the west of Argentina. The school, large brick complex surrounded by high walls serving boarding and day school to dozens of deaf children, It opened in 1998with Corradi as spiritual director.

According to the alleged victim, Corradi drew a child to his bedroom, in the corridors lit by fluorescent lamps, for the first timewhen he was about 7 years old, and now he's a shy boy and delicate 22 years. In an interview with The Post, the man remembered his confusion when Corradi undressed him. following the throbbing pain of rape. Subsequently, Corradi gave him a toy, a small blue van. "I could not look him in the eyes," said the man using sign language. "It scared me..

He said that he had been raped regularly for the next five years.. He recalled that during difficult tests, he would look at a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus, not far from the bed of Corradi. He said that he could see Corradi utter words that he could neither hear nor understand.

The school does not teach sign languagebut adopted a methodology that sought teach deaf children to read and speak as an audience. Prosecutors say this system was also ideal for concealing abuse. Beaten students say that they learned sign language in secret by the greatest studentsbut even that did not help me much.

The man of 22 years old and her sister – the 24-year-old who wanted Francis to come to Argentina and see what was happening there, and who said he was raped as a child by another Provolo employee – came from a poor family whose parents had limited knowledge of sign language.

"We did not want to go to school, but our parents were convinced that it was better for us."said the sister. So they abused us at home. They beat us because our parents simply They thought we did not want to go to school. "

Prosecutors say that, as spiritual director of the school, Corradi not only took part in the abuses, but also facilitated access to children for other badual predators working in school.

Prosecutors and victims claim that under Corradi's leadership, a Japanese nun, Kosaka Kumiko, would take care of the most docile children. She would touch them and touch them themselves. Kumiko has maintained her innocence in court.

Among the alleged perpetrators in Lujan is also a Deaf man with mental problemsnow in his forties, prosecutors say that he was abandoned child at the Instituto Provolo de La Plata. They say that the man told other victims that Corradi had badaulted him. And when Corradi turned it gardener in the new Provolo school In Lujan, it is said that the man began to mistreat other children.

The worst cases of abuse documented by Lujan's prosecutors occurred between 2004 and 2009. During these years, Francis served as Cardinal Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, a diocese located 700 miles southeast of Lujan de Cuyo, would not have been responsible for the acts committed at the school. However, accusations in Argentina of abuse and corruption of minors they extend beyond the warning of the church and long after, Italian victims tried to directly alert Francis in 2013. The most recent incident involving Corradi concerns the distribution of badgraphy to children in 2013. Other suspects would also have affected students in one way inappropriate in 2015 and 2016.

The inaction of the church allowed the alleged perpetrators stay in touch every day with the children, until an anxious alumnus goes to school. Argentine authorities.

The 27-year-old who, like the other victims, She spoke on condition of anonymity, said to have been raped by an Argentine priest who served under Corradi. In an interview, he said that for years he had thought about committing suicide and even wrote a suicide note to his parents before stand on a cliff Near a river and weigh if you jump.

"I felt like water, as if it was nothing"He said in sign language at his lawyer's office in Mendoza, Argentina. "I wanted to kill myself, but I had to continue living with it every year".

A friend, he said, convinced her that what she needed, as well as other victims, was that justice be done. Then, in November 2016, he entered a state center for people with disabilities and asked for a sign language interpreter. Then they would go together to the state parliament, where, November 24, 2016they met a state senator who sounded the alarm.

Act quickly on your testimony, Prosecutors raided the school two days later, looking for badgraphy and letters involving one of Corradi's collaborators.Father Horacio Corbacho, Argentine priest of 58 years. In the court records, a badually suggestive letter, apparently written by somebody familiar with the abuse, he asks Corbacho "how much more silence can you ask a deaf-mute?"

Jorge Bordon, the 62 year old Corradi pilot, last year pleaded guilty to 11 counts of abuse. His confession implicated some of the other defendants, although Corbacho, Kumiko and others have denied the accusations. Corradi, under house arrest in a place Not disclosed in Argentina and facing six counts of serious beatingsyou must always plead guilty.

Reverend Alberto Germán Bochatey, a bishop appointed by the pope to oversee Provolo's schools After the scandal, he said that Corradi thinks he's innocent.

"We feel destroyed," said Bochatey, who met Corradi two months ago. "He built this school."

After the closure of the Lujan School by the Argentine authorities In November 2016, the Vatican commissioned two priests to carry out a internal investigation in progress. Prosecutors said that church leaders in Argentina had rejected their request for release of the results.

Bochatey, who is not involved in the investigation, denied the lack of cooperation of the church. He stated that he had received a request for a report and responded in a letter to the prosecutors should be presented directly to the Vatican. He said that he did not forward the request. Stroppiana, the prosecutor, said that do not remember having received a response from Bochatey or any other authority of the church.

Bochatey blamed prosecutors and lawyers for the victims for exaggerating the scope of the allegations. Il a suggéré que les francs-maçons, membres d'un ordre fraternel connu pour ses rituels secrets et son service rendu à la communauté que l'Église catholique a considérée comme antagonistes Ils étaient en quelque sorte derrière les accusations, bien qu'il ait reconnu que l'église n'avait pas de "preuves".

"Nous croyons que l'ordre maçonnique était derrière tout ça" he said. "Nous ne pouvons pas comprendre pourquoi (les accusations) sont si directes et intenses, ils essaient de construire une grande affaire qui (c'était une) maison des horreurs, 40 ou 50 cas, mais il n’ya guère plus de 10 ".

He added: "J'ai parlé à beaucoup de parents qui ont dit que leurs enfants étaient heureux, ils ne voulaient pas que leur école soit fermée." Il a poursuivi: "Je pense que quelque chose est arrivé, mais pas comme ils sont en essayant de montrer"

Il a défendu l'approche de l'école enseigner aux sourds, en disant que le point était que ils vont lire et parler. Certains enseignants ont peut-être été trop stricts, a-t-il dit.

"Peut-être qu'un enseignant s'est parfois trompé", he said.

L'église, a-t-il dit, n'a pas seulement été forcée de fermer l'école de Lujan, mais également de vendre le terrain sur lequel elle se trouve..

"Nous payons chèrement notre erreur"he said.

Harlan et Pitrelli ont rapporté de Verona, Italie Rachelle Krygier dans Caracas, Venezuela et Natalio Cosoy, dans Buenos Aires, a contribué à ce rapport.