ROME
Crux
By Inés San Martín
Vatican correspondent March 16, 2015
ROME — After a direct request from Pope Francis reportedly sparked the opening of a sex abuse investigation against an Italian priest, a survivors’ group in the United States has complained that the pontiff’s actions do not constitute “real reform.”
The story of the letter and subsequent investigation was first reported in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, which identified the victim only as a 39-year-old male with the pseudonym “Diego” from the southern Italian city of Naples.
According to the newspaper account, Diego claimed to have been abused by the Rev. Silverio Mura, a religion teacher in his school, from the age of 11 until he was 17.
The reports say that after psychological treatment, in 2010 Diego decided to take the allegations to the police. Because of a statute of limitations, however, no investigation was ever opened. …
On Monday, however, the leading activist group for clerical abuse survivors in the United States played down the significance of the pope’s action.
“Two phone calls do not constitute real reform,” read a statement from the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. “We endanger children and help predators if we let two phone calls diminish pressure for substantive change.”
The reference was to a separate case in Granada, Spain, where Pope Francis called an abuse victim who had written him to encourage the victim to make a report, setting an investigation into motion.
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