Dino Cinel,
the former Catholic priest whose cache of child pornography and
videotaped sex with young men in an Uptown rectory shook New Orleans in
1991, is living in Italy and petitioning the Vatican for justice as a
former sexual abuse victim himself.
After months of effort, he has found little or no help for victims there, Cinel recently told SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.
But SNAP has extended limited sympathy.
“We
don’t doubt that Cinel was sexually abused as a youngster by a priest,”
said spokesman David Clohessy. “But no one should lose sight of the
fact that he’s a dangerous predator.”
Cinel told SNAP of his
mission and shared a letter he said he wrote to Pope Benedict XVI
describing his lack of success and his frustration with the Vatican
justice system.
He said the Vatican’s formal judicial procedures
made no room for the care of victims abused by clergy, and that he has
spent months vainly pressing his case, once meeting with Monsignor
Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s chief prosecutor on allegations of
sexual abuse.
“I had the feeling that after the physical abuse of
many years ago I was now submitted to the intellectual and emotional
abuse by not being believed,” he wrote Benedict.
It was not clear
what kind of reparation Cinel seeks. Beyond a brief response to an email
query from The Times-Picayune, he declined to elaborate on his mission.
Church policies assign local bishops responsibility for the care of sex-abuse victims.
Cinel,
now 68, said he was abused between the ages of 12 and 16 by an unnamed
priest. It is not clear where the abuse occurred, although Cinel is a
native of Italy.
Cinel said he is temporarily living in Italy to
press his case because he got no response to letters dispatched from the
United States.
Quietly managed events
His story
rocked New Orleans in 1991. It would prove to be a precursor to the
national Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal that erupted in Boston 11
years later.
Cinel, a historian, was on the faculty at Tulane
University and living at the rectory of St. Rita Catholic Church in late
1988 when a colleague found in his room a cache of commercial child
pornography and homemade videotapes of Cinel having sex with young men.
By
telephone, Archbishop Philip Hannan fired Cinel, who was then
vacationing in Italy.
Hannan suggested he start a new life elsewhere.
Meanwhile,
District Attorney Harry Connick allowed the church to keep the
videotapes for weeks, so it could try to identify and reach out to
victims, the church said.
Connick then decided the case was too weak to
prosecute.
The case created a firestorm when a former sexual
partner who said he was underage at the time of their videotaped
encounter sued Cinel. Civil depositions laid bare the quietly managed
events involving Cinel, Hannan and Connick 18 months earlier.
Although
Hannan and Connick both said they acted appropriately, many read the
events to mean that Connick’s cooperation with Hannan amounted to
inappropriate collusion — and that Hannan’s advice to Cinel in Italy to
start over somewhere else amounted to a tip-off.
Cinel ultimately
returned, although not as a priest, and Connick prosecuted him for
possession of commercial child pornography.
But Cinel was acquitted when
he demonstrated that he had acquired the material before a 1986 statute
made its mere possession illegal.
By that time Cinel had left the priesthood and married.
Priesthood revoked
Sarah
MacDonald, the spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, said the
Vatican last year formally “laicized” Cinel, formally revoking his
priesthood.
Both Cinel and the Archdiocese of New Orleans joined in that
petition, she said.
From the earliest days of the scandal Cinel disclosed that he was himself a victim of clerical sexual abuse.
In subsequent years he said he underwent extensive therapy that enabled him to marry and have a family.
Now,
describing his largely fruitless petitioning in Italy, Cinel told SNAP:
“After months of dealing with these gentlemen, it became obvious to me
that there is absolutely no interest in acknowledging the existence of
the issue, much less to deal with it. The protection of the church is
the exclusive interest, protection to be understood as denial of the
facts, no accountability, and no help of any kind.”
But SNAP, for its part, has kept its distance from Cinel.
“We
concur with him that Catholic officials treat victims terribly, and we
are pessimistic about the prospects that the hierarchy will or can
reform itself,” Clohessy said.
“(But) those who want a safer church for
kids should, we feel, focus their energies on lobbying secular
authorities, not church authorities.”