UNITED STATES
Church Militant
By Juliana Freitag
Read Part I and Part II of this series.
Earlier in May a third cleric from Brindisi was sentenced to four years of incarceration: Fr. Francesco Legrottaglie, 67, was convicted for possession of child pornography. The sentence also included a 1,600-euro fine, a five-year ban from public office, and a perpetual ban from schools and any other institutions attended by minors.
In November 2015, Legrottaglie was arrested “in flagrante” during a police visit to his house, where they found thousands of files named after Catholic saints containing images and videos of explicit child-related sexual material. The prosecution claims the priest often looked for online interaction with the youngsters and secretly recorded the video chats.
The route that led the magistracy to Legrottaglie has been kept secret, but it’s likely linked to all of the other recent scandals in the Brindisi archdiocese, owing to the fact that all cases have been conducted by state’s attorney Milton Stefano di Nozza, who ordered Legrottaglie’s arrest.
This isn’t the first time the priest has been taken in by the authorities. In 1991, when he was the priest of a parish in Ostuni, the parents of two little girls pressed charges against him, and in 1992 he was sentenced to 1 year and 10 months for “violent libidinous act”. At the time of the condemnation he had already been transferred to a military parish in the city of Bari. After the conviction Legrottaglie was sent to mission in Congo, and when the priest returned in 2010, the Curia of Brindisi-Ostuni, under the discerning guidance of Archbishop RoccoTalucci, nominated him a chaplain at Brindisi’s hospital. He later returned to his hometown Ostuni, where he was allowed to be an assistant in a local parish, which is where he was last arrested.
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