Up to 100 priests in Italy were blackmailed by two men who used Facebook and Messenger to snare them, according to a police investigation.
The
men, who were arrested on suspicion of blackmail on 26 July, demanded
up to €10,000 (£8,000) from priests in return for keeping quiet about
erotic webcam sessions and real sexual encounters, reported Italian
weekly Panorama citing judicial sources.
After seizing contact
lists and records of virtual sex sessions from the house shared by the
men, Diego Maria Caggiano, 35, and Giuseppe Trementino, 30, police
believe the priests targeted were sharing details of potential sexual
partners through a private internet forum.
Trementino has told
investigators that he began to have sexual relations with a priest after
a chance meeting last year while he was working for a courier company
in the southern region of Molise.
The priest paid Trementino regular
sums of money and bought him a car but eventually reported him to the
police.
In the meantime, Trementino said a second priest contacted
him through Facebook and invited him to spend three days in a hotel in
Rome with him, offering him a train fare and €300 to buy cannabis,
alcohol and condoms.
Trementino claims he then began to receive
requests for erotic webcam sessions from "tens" of priests. He added: "I
would get up to five requests a day from all over Italy, even one from
France. I felt I had ended up in a net of perversion."
Police
suspect Caggiano, Trementino's housemate, of demanding up to €10,000
from the priests for their silence, with one sending €7,000.
Contacted
by police, the priest said he put the money together from donations from
parishioners whose houses he had blessed and by cutting back on the
economic assistance he provided to the local poor.
The Vatican
officially regards homosexual sex as a sin.
Last year, a book published
in Italy, Sex and the Vatican, accused the Vatican of turning a blind
eye towards priests who frequent gay clubs in Rome.