UNITED STATES
Church Militant
by Juliana Freitag • ChurchMilitant.com • February 19, 2017
Casting a spotlight on sex abuse in the Vatican
Italian author Emiliano Fittipaldi, one of the defendants in the 2016 Vatileaks 2.0 trial, recently published his book Lust: Sins, Scandals and Betrayals of a Church Made of Men, detailing never-before-known facts about sexual scandals in Rome. He recently spoke with Church Militant in this exclusive interview.
Editor’s Note: The author’s opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of ChurchMilitant.com.
CM: What prompted you to write this book?
EF: Well, it’s actually quite simple. I’m an investigative journalist; I investigate power. In my previous book, Greed, the one that led me to be prosecuted in the Vatican, I tried to understand how far Pope Francis’ reform had gone. And I actually discovered that the Vatican scandals hadn’t been tackled at all. I went after a monsignor who works inside the Vatican, and he advised me to go ahead and find out whether there had been any actual changes regarding procedures to handle sex abuse charges. And this monsignor himself confirmed to me that there hadn’t been any changes.
He showed me information from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where in the last three years, during the pontificate of Pope Francis, accusations have doubled compared to the period of 2005–2010. More than 1,200 complaints were brought forward. I thought that was interesting and decided to inspect this phenomenon. I wanted to understand if the Church was really doing what She had promised to do, and I found out that no, She’s not doing it.
CM: You wrote an article in La Repubblica stating that you found out there are more than 200 cases of priests accused of sexual crimes in Italy. It’s quite incredible that Italy has never seen a Spotlight investigation akin to what took place in the United States when the Boston Globe exposed the sex abuse crisis in the American Church in 2002.
EF: Well, this is what I tried to do with this book.
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