Abuse: how serious is the problem in Argentina

Argentina has about 5600 priests. According to the LA NACION survey, in the last 20 years, 63 people
consistent complaints of badual abuse. In 17 cases, there has been a judicial conviction and 22 ongoing judicial proceedings. To these, we must add the 24 concordant accusations, but they have never been pursued (in four of them, the process was truncated).

How do these figures compare to what happened in other countries? Compared to the number of religious involved in
United States,
Chile, Ireland, Australia or
Germany, the Argentine figures seem minor. But there is a big difference: in Argentina, there has never been a global survey, unlike what happened in those countries. Neither the Church nor justice. The dimension of the problem can therefore be much more serious than what the first figures revealed by LA NACION indicate.

There are no global figures either. It is not even possible to know exactly what is happening in a given country because those who have opened investigations, like the United States, have always been biased. In some cases, prosecutors were motorized; in others, the dioceses. "It's impossible to know how many cases there are around the world because the Church has been trying to hide them for centuries, but we know that what we do know is that the visible part of the Iceberg, "says Carlos Lombardi, a lawyer specializing in canon law. and a reference from the network of ecclesiastical survivors of abuse.

Prosecutor Gustavo Stroppiana is the head of cases of mistreatment of deaf children at the Próvolo Institute of Mendoza. Although the case has been branched out at La Plata headquarters, its investigation can not go beyond the boundaries of the province. "I can not investigate what is happening outside of my jurisdiction, I have no jurisdiction, there are those we call satellite, but we can not investigate them," he says. "Yes, we can, for example, show the systematic transfer, but later it will be a function of the prosecutor Cecilia Cordfield La Plata to investigate what happened there, our function we limit ".

Stroppiana adds another element: the lack of collaboration of the Church. "The Church could conduct an investigation to find out who they were and where the priests were denounced, we did not have the collaboration of the Church, two emissaries of the Vatican came forward, we had two interviews, we sent a letter asking for information, but they never answered us. " said.

In other countries

"We, the members of this grand jury, need your listening," said the report released by Pennsylvania Justice on August 15 last year. And he continued: "There have been other reports of badual abuse of children within the Catholic Church, but never on this scale, for many of us, all these stories have happened elsewhere, far away … Now we know the truth: they have happened everywhere. " .

The report details, on 1356 pages, the names of 301 priests accused of abuse. Its victims, over seven decades, totaled more than 1,000 people.

The Pennsylvania data were provided a month after the Chilean national prosecutor revealed the extent of the problem in that country: 158 church-related people, between priests and laity, were involved of an investigation for badual violence.

Thus, one by one, they learned the existence of reports of a tragedy in which the attackers were counted by the hundreds.

The Pennsylvania report, a month later, was followed by that of Germany: in September, an investigation revealed that between 1946 and 2014, priests reported for mistreatment in the Federal Republic of Germany were 1670. Of all these names, only 88 were sanctioned. with expulsion. The data came from a survey requested by the German episcopate at three universities and to which the weeklies had access.
Der Spiegel and
Die Zeit.

A few days later, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles published a list containing the names of 309 priests accused of abuse. The charges were so convincing that the testimonies were handed over to the police and religious who were prohibited from practicing priesthood in their parishes.

The year 2018 had not yet started optimally for Pope Francis. His historic visit to Chile on January 15 was tainted by claims of ecclesiastical abuse victims, whose perseverance ended with a request for apologies from the pope himself and by the decision of justice to go ahead with an investigation. It was the first step in a series of reports that showed the extent of abuse.

In 2009, the Irish government determined that "there is no doubt that badual abuse of children in the clergy was hidden" from January 1975 to May 2004. The government of that country had decided to conduct its own survey of the diocese of Dublin Instead, it was a newspaper survey
The globe of Boston – received later by the film
Spotlight– the one who showed the camouflage plot in the diocese of Boston and forced the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law.

In 2017, a commission of the Australian government determined that 7% of the priests of this country were accused of abuse between 1950 and 2015. Among them was the number three of the Vatican, Cardinal George Pell, 76 years old In 2018 he was convicted of five cases of pedophilia.

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