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With Hand Signs, Deaf Kids Were Groomed for Sex, and Pope Francis Is Implicated
http://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2018/10/04/with-hand-signs-deaf-kids-were-groomed-for-sex-and-pope-francis-is-implicated/
With Hand Signs, Deaf Kids Were Groomed for Sex, and Pope Francis Is Implicated
Did Pope Francis, in his days as a cardinal, knowingly shield clergy child abusers from justice by shuffling them from one diocese to another? In Italy and Argentina, detectives are looking into it.
Follow along with this sickening account from the Daily Beast.Sixty-seven young boys … have been named in court documents and were allegedly abused by more than two dozen priests and brothers at the Provolo Institute [a school for the deaf in Italy], according to Verona prosecutors who have been investigating the allegations for nearly a decade and who plan to bring it to trial later this year.
The Beast recounts what happened to one boy, Giuseppe, who was born deaf and mute and whose parents surrendered him to the Church-founded Provolo school.
When [Giuseppe] was 11, a monk who worked at the institute as an educator started teaching “special secret signs” for things like masturbation, fellatio, penis, and anus. “I didn’t understand at first just why this man was teaching me these strange secret signs,” Giuseppe explained in an exclusive, and very emotional, interview in Rome. “Then one day it became very clear when one of the priests made the secret sign for fellatio when we were alone, which was followed by him pushing his erect penis into my mouth.”
From that point on, Giuseppe said through his interpreter — often using fast and somewhat violent sign language as tears ran down his face — priests and the brothers would give a sign to the young boys and then take them to special rooms Giuseppe says were used for “time out” punishments or as resting areas. He said that because everyone was deaf at the school except those who worked there, no one could hear the screams and cries of the young boys when the abuse took place.
Giuseppe said that on several occasions he and others tried to write down what was happening, but because their letters and notes were given to the priests and brothers to be mailed…
… those missives never made it out.
(snip)
It spiraled further from there, and this is where Pope Francis is possibly involved:Julieta Añazco was one of those victims at the [Argentinian] Provolo Institute. She says she was first abused by Father Ricardo Giménez, who worked at the institute. He first attacked her when she was just seven years old, she says, when the two were in a tent being used as a confessional at a Catholic youth festival. The abuse went on for three years before her parents found out and filed a complaint. Giménez was then transferred by the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, under the direction of then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis.
Añazco and other students from the Provolo Institute say they repeatedly requested a meeting with Bergoglio, but that he ignored them. Shortly after he became Pope Francis, the group wrote a letter to his Vatican address in which they again laid out what had happened in Argentina on his watch. This time, the pontiff got right on the case and assured the victims that a sweeping investigation was underway.
Just kidding. The Pope’s stony silence continued.
The Holy Father has since only apologized for church sexual abuse in generic, non-specific terms, and he continues to stubbornly sidestep the issue when asked about it by journalists.
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