The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith saves the «beggar of love» Don Valentino Salvoldi, priest of the diocese of Bergamo, despite dozens of testimonies of sexual abuses against him.
He took the children to his bed, kissed them at length on the mouth, and rubbed against them under the excuse of talking about God; he made them undress and caressed them while they bathed naked with him during summer camps.
Candlelit dinners in which the priest encouraged the boys to touch each other, manipulations that lasted for years, between praises and promises of forming part of a spiritual elite in which common rules did not apply.
However, all this was not enough to bring the abuser to trial: the case of Don Valentino Salvoldi, priest of the diocese of Bergamo, responsible for having harassed and sexually abused at least 21 boys, including several minors, concluded with the dismissal of both the criminal and ecclesiastical proceedings.
On September 3, 2024, prosecutor Elena Torresin, deputy public prosecutor of the Udine court, had already decided not to proceed against the priest, now in his eighties, because the crimes had prescribed, a decision that was confirmed in 2025 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which decided «not to derogate the elapsed prescription».
Pope Francis had reiterated on several occasions that abuses against minors do not disappear in the Church and that prescription is always waived in these cases, but the judges of the Dicastery headed by prefect Tucho Fernández must have a short memory.
On the other hand, even Bergoglio’s exhortation to «zero tolerance» with abuses has remained a statement of intent, something that is fine to say but which is then not really intended to be put into practice, certainly not at the cost of the good name of the Church and its bishops.
Precisely on abuses and the lack of listening to victims, Pope Leo also returned in early January, in the concluding intervention of the first extraordinary consistory of his pontificate, held before 170 cardinals:
«The abuse itself causes a deep wound that may last a lifetime; but often the scandal in the Church is due to the fact that the door has been closed and the victims have not been welcomed, accompanying them with the closeness of authentic shepherds».
However, the full awareness of the problem on the part of the Vatican does not correspond to an adequate reaction: ecclesiastical authorities, at all levels, continue to keep locked the drawers with documents on cases of sexual violence and are eager to close the thorny files of clerical pedophilia, in order to continue acting without disturbance, as demonstrated by the immovable bishop of Piazza Armerina, Rosario Gisana (of whom we spoke in the podcast La Confessione), now on trial for false testimony.
The judicial case of Don Salvoldi is, therefore, very interesting because it highlights the omertà behavior, the total lack of transparency, and the guilty delay of the Church in abuse cases.
And not only that: priests and bishops are so indifferent to the suffering of the victims that they don’t even bother to keep up appearances, and it even happens that they entrust investigations into pedophile priests to the same people who deal with the Diocesan Services for the Protection of Minors.
We’ll get to that.
But first, it must be underlined that, once again, if we have learned about the case of an abusing priest it is not thanks to a gesture of transparency from the Church, which is directly responsible, but solely to the courage of the victims, who reported it to the justice system and the press.
The first of them was Stefano Schiavon, who was 17 years old at the time of the events and who located dozens of boys who attended the summer camps organized by the charismatic priest of Bergamo between the 90s and 2000s, reconstructing with precision the dynamics of the approaches, the manipulation, and the abuses.
I told the story of Valentino Salvoldi, serial predator of children, in two articles published in Domani, on December 27, 2023 and on February 10, 2024. This is how Salvoldi interpreted his priestly vocation:
Don Valentino Salvoldi, priest of the diocese of Bergamo, defines himself as «a beggar of love».
He is a passionate preacher who dedicates his life to freeing the evangelical message from the chains in which, according to him, a too rigid Church has bound it: he speaks of the joy of the body and invites to replace the sign of peace at the end of Mass with long hugs.
After having been a missionary in Africa, he returns to Italy and, in the early 90s, begins to organize camps for young adults in which he assumes the role of progressive priest, open to dialogue and critical of capitalist society.
However, he soon decides to address teenagers because, according to him, it is the age in which the person is formed and afterward «it’s too late to change».
He invites them to seek the truth, to travel, and to choose a life master to guide them.
This is precisely the relationship he establishes with his «favorites», to whom he pays special attention, kissing them on the mouth and taking them to bed «for a nap» or for confession.
They are children, some barely thirteen years old, and the experience of a school camp with a priest who dares to say transgressive things fascinates them.
He rewards them with praises and encouragements and, if they recoil when he touches their intimate parts, he immediately reassures them: «what we do here is good».
«It was the year 1996 or 1997: during a summer camp in Val d’Ossola, Salvoldi took us to bathe in a hot spring», recounts Samuele (fictitious name).
«There, without exchanging many words, as if it was already clear what was going to happen, the boys undressed and the priest did the same continues Samuele. We immersed ourselves in the water and, in turns, received the caresses and kisses from Don Valentino.
If someone started to get excited, Don Valentino explained that it was «just something mechanical» and that he too would «get hard» - exact words - if he put it under the powerful jet of thermal water».
Salvoldi himself, Samuele specifies, would then comment on the day with the boys in front of the mothers who had come to pick them up, thus normalizing what had just happened.
In August 2002, in Mione, in the province of Udine, Francesco (fictitious name), today 44 years old, finds himself in one of the camps organized by Salvoldi: «He created a suggestive atmosphere for the children, with nighttime rituals characterized by dim lights and music, in which he was the guru: I clearly remember seeing him kiss some boys», he recounts.
Davide (fictitious name), who was just twenty years old at the time, also participated in the Mione camp and remembers the «para-spiritual» atmosphere created by the priest and the candlelit evenings: «A child, visibly depressed, was Valentino’s companion page», he says.
«My story - Davide emphasizes - shows how the priest is capable of waiting for the right moment and the premeditated and malicious mechanics of his behavior».
In the camp, Salvoldi does not try to physically approach Davide - only once he approaches him to smell his hair, but he asks him to help him draft the book he is writing.
Thus, Davide corrects Don Salvoldi’s drafts for a couple of years; once the work is finished, he wants to send him the text, but the priest insists that he deliver it in person.
The priest asks him to meet him in a village where he is passing through; first they have lunch at a friend’s house and then they go to the hotel where he is staying to talk about the book.
«As soon as I entered the room, Salvoldi stuck his tongue in my mouth and I remember the disgust I felt, the sensation of his rough beard on my chin. Disgusted, I left immediately», says Davide.
And a few years later, here are the memories of another witness, Ettore (fictitious name): «I participated in two of Salvoldi’s camps, in 2006 and 2008, when I was 16 and 18 years old - he recounts : The first night, Don Valentino called me to his room because he wanted to talk to me. He told me to lie down on the bed to hug each other, but I refused».
Ettore manages not to be deceived by the priest, but he realizes the peculiar atmosphere surrounding him: «During these camps, a candlelit dinner was held in which we fed each other - he tells Domani - and then the boys were invited to hug each other by putting our hands under the T-shirt».
And not only that: «I clearly saw Don Valentino kiss a boy at length on the mouth while he was sitting on his lap».
Ettore is disconcerted, but he thinks that if no one objects, maybe the kisses are also part of the «ritual».
«Valentino said that the rules from outside didn’t apply, that with him new rules had to be followed based on love, physical contact, and being together».
The priest moves between Lombardy, Rome, and Africa, where he loves to preach love in all its forms (at least until they kick him out) and where his high regard for himself leads him to fall into some sins of vanity:
On his website, the biographical data are generic: he writes that he studied for twenty-five years and that for another twenty-five he taught philosophy and moral theology, especially as a visiting professor in third-world countries.
«Now I am at the service of the Holy See for the formation of the clergy of the young Churches», he adds, without specifying what this «service» consists of.
He is a «fidei donum», that is, a priest sent to exercise ministry in mission lands, but above all he is a very prolific author: he publishes with different publishers (Paoline, Elledici, Gabrielli editori, Città Nuova, and others) popular essays on morals, collections of prayers, biographies, some of them also translated abroad. His style is emphatic, full of catchy phrases, and the recurring theme is love in all its expressions.
On the Gabrielli editori website, we read that he was a professor of philosophy and moral theology at the Alphonsian Academy in Rome and that «for his commitment he was expelled from seven African states, faced the firing squad twice in Nigeria, and escaped stoning in Bangladesh».
In reality, his teaching at the Alphonsian was limited to a single semester, in 1988-1989, «as a guest, with a course on «The sacred in African cultures»», as attested by Father Maurizio Faggioni, professor of bioethics at the same institute.
He is so concerned with building his image as a scholar and devoted missionary that he invests a few hundred dollars to include his name in the «Distinguished Leadership» yearbook («for his eminent contributions as a writer and promoter of justice and peace»), published for a fee by the American Biographical Institute of Raleigh, North Carolina, an entity that has been sued several times for fraud.
A detail that confirms the priest’s egocentrism, who during a conference in Ethiopia in 2002 did not hesitate to define himself as too «handsome and intelligent» to please the Church; a Church that «fears» him and prefers to ordain «more normal» people.
Unsatisfied with the activity of the school camps, Salvoldi decides in the early 2000s to think big and founds the non-profit organization Shalom, «a non-profit organization of social utility, whose aim is the moral formation and cultural growth of young people».
Its motto is «young people save young people» and it promises «the joy of hearing the beat of drums, while feet move happily in the dance of the dream of «new heavens and new earth»», as read in a presentation brochure.
The president is his brother, Giancarlo Salvoldi, politician, elected deputy for the Greens from 1987 to 1992. After a few years, the non-profit organization is liquidated and on the Internet there are no traces of projects actually carried out.
Brother of a former deputy, Salvoldi is, therefore, an evanescent priest, a missionary without a parish with a vague and unclear biography even for his own diocese, which seems to know him very little. Don Francesco Airoldi, deputy director of the Diocesan Service for the Protection of Minors of Bergamo and episcopal chancellor, responds to the carabinieri’s request for information on the priest with a letter full of «as far as we know», emphasizing that Salvoldi «carries out his activity mainly outside the territory of the diocese of Bergamo and for other ecclesiastical entities».
In short, he washes his hands, and shows himself equally evasive when questioned on November 14, 2023 as a person informed about the facts, to the point that the police, in the final investigation report sent to the deputy prosecutor, will qualify the behavior of the high ranks of the Bergamo curia as «Pilates-like», «willing to completely deny knowledge of the acts of the priest Salvoldi and to entrench itself behind captious competencies of a bureaucratic-state nature with the sole aim of safeguarding the extraneousness of the facts from its own diocese».
The Diocesan Service for the Protection of Minors of Bergamo responded with some discomfort to the complaint about Salvoldi received on October 18, 2023 from Francesco Zanardi, president of the Network against Abuse, who acted as spokesperson for «a dozen victims» and requested the opening of a preliminary investigation into the priest.
«This Diocesan Service is undoubtedly willing to listen directly to the interested persons», wrote the person in charge of the Listening Center of the Diocesan Service for the Protection of Minors, Rosaria Cavallaro, and specified: «To open a preliminary investigation in an effective and fruitful way, it is essential to know the identity of the complainants and to gather their account directly».
That same day, Zanardi also forwarded the complaint to the president of the bishops, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, and six days later filed a complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office.
The news of the missionary priest too attentive to children reached the press and on December 24 a brief note appeared on the diocese’s website:
«In relation to some news items appeared in the press about an elderly priest of the clergy of this diocese for alleged facts dating back to the 90s, the pertinent measures have already been taken to activate the procedures provided for by canon law, without prejudice to respect for the work of the judiciary in the common objective of ascertaining the truth».
On December 27, the article is published in Domani and two days later Salvoldi responds in the columns of the Corriere della Sera that he is innocent and that the kisses and hugs «were signs of tenderness and peace, of love for God» and that his was «a liberating pedagogy».
The diocese of Bergamo and the CEI are, therefore, informed since October 2023 that the missionary priest Salvoldi has an inclination for children, but they wait more than a year before launching an investigation into him.
In fact, Stefano Schiavon was not contacted by the diocese of Bergamo until November 15, 2024 as «a person potentially informed about the facts», 367 days after Don Airoldi’s statement to the carabinieri.
But if the diocese thought about it for a long time, the victim’s testimony must arrive immediately, at the latest within six days, including holidays.
It is worth reproducing the email in full to appreciate the Church’s empathy towards a possible victim:
Dear Dr. Schiavon:
In the canonical process that the diocese of Bergamo is carrying out against the Reverend Valentino Salvoldi, your name has emerged as a person potentially informed about the facts under investigation, in accordance with canon law.
For this reason, the diocese of Bergamo invites you to testify about the facts under investigation in the aforementioned canonical procedure, specifying from this moment that you are not obliged to appear or to testify. If you decide to testify, the date and time of your hearing will be arranged; if you decide not to accept the invitation, the canonical procedure will follow its normal course.
It is hereby specified that testimony in the canonical sphere does not entail or imply in any way the deprivation or limitation of any right before the competent judicial authority of the Italian State, as these are two independent and autonomous legal systems (the canonical and the civil), each regulated by its own norms.
Awaiting a kind response, we thank you and greet you attentively.
But the best is yet to come.
The email is signed by «Dr. Arianna Dutto, delegate of the investigation» and comes directly from the Tutela minori of the Bergamo curia (tutelaminori@curia.bergamo.it), a rather singular email address for a person dealing with an investigation into a pedophile priest.
Equally singular is the profession of the person in charge herself: in fact, Arianna Dutto, lawyer of the Milan Bar Association, not only is part, as understood, of the Service for the Protection of Minors of the diocese of Bergamo, but is also a member of several commissions for the protection of minors and advisor to ecclesiastical bodies and ordinaries of the Catholic Church; she is also part of the Regional Service for the Protection of Minors of Lazio.
A notable curriculum - not in vain she is often called upon to provide training in the ecclesiastical field, but certainly not exactly a guarantee of impartiality in an investigation for abuses against minors.
