Italy’s top cardinal in a message read
aloud Sunday at Mass informed shocked faithful in a Genoa suburb that
their longtime pastor has been jailed for investigation of pedophilia
and giving drugs to a minor.
Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, archbishop of Genoa, also heads
Italy’s bishops conference. He unexpectedly had shown up at Saturday
evening Mass in the church to express his “shame.”
On Sunday, his
message denouncing the alleged “immoral behavior” of the Rev. Riccardo
Seppia was read out to parishioners in Holy Spirit church in Sestri
Ponente.
The message reiterated the cardinal’s stern rebuke of the 51-year-old Seppia which Bagnasco delivered personally a day earlier.
“While we renew our full trust in justice and its task of ferreting out
the truth of the affair, I have come here, dear friends, to share your
shock and heartache, together with shame and total disapproval if the
grave accusations end up being confirmed,” Bagnasco said.
Italian
news reports said the priest, who had served as Holy Spirit’s pastor for
14 years, was arrested Friday night for allegedly abusing a 16-year-old
boy and giving him cocaine.
Bagnasco told parishioners Seppia was suspended from all ministry duties, including celebrating the sacraments.
Italian
news reports said Seppia’s lawyer was studying what defense strategy to
adopt for the priest, who was scheduled to be interrogated by
magistrates in jail Monday.
The lawyer could not immediately be reached
for comment.
Clergy sex abuse scandals have only recently emerged
in heavily Catholic Italy after years of silence.
The cardinal’s swift,
hands-on reaction to the arrest was a sharp departure from a deep-rooted
tendency of Italian churchmen to defend their ranks in a country where
the Vatican is politically influential and citizens often deferential to
clergy.
Many Italians depend on their local parishes to provide
social services that their government generally lags behind in,
especially activities for children, like after-school sports programs
and summer camps.
While clergy sex abuse scandals exploded in the
U.S., much of Western Europe and elsewhere in the past two decades, the
church in Italy had appeared to be largely unscathed. But the last few
years have seen several criminal cases brought against Italian priests,
and the pace of the crackdown could be quickening.
This spring, a
court in Florence sentenced a former priest to 4 1/2 years in prison for
alleged sexual violence against a girl.
A few weeks earlier, a Rome
court had convicted a former pastor in the Italian capital of sexually
abusing seven children who attended parish summer camp and after-school
programs and sentenced him to more than 15 years in prison.
The
Vatican has been struggling to convince its worldwide flock that is
serious about swiftly rooting out pedophile priests from the ministry
and protecting minors from them.