What happened?
Two priests have been jailed for more than 40 years each for raping and sexually abusing deaf children at a school in Argentina. The school gardener was jailed for 18 years.Fr Horacio Corbacho, 59, was sentenced to 45 years, and Fr Nicola Corradi, 83, to 42 years. The priests were found guilty of 20 counts of abuse between 2005 and 2016 at the now-closed Antonio Provolo Institute for Deaf and Hearing Impaired Children in Lujan de Cuyo in north-western Argentina.
What the media said
The secular media around the world have reported the details of the case, saying that it has shocked Argentines – especially as Corradi had faced similar accusations years before at the Antonio Provolo Institute in Verona, Italy, but was never charged.
The Guardian was one of several papers which said that the victims felt the local Church and the Vatican had failed them. It quoted Anne Barrett Doyle of the online research database BishopAccountability.org speaking to the Associated Press: “The Argentine court has given the traumatised children of Provolo a measure of justice that the Catholic Church failed to give them.”
She continued: “The horror of Provolo is twofold: the torture of the children and the Church’s failure to prevent it.”
What the Catholic media said
The Catholic News Agency quoted one survivor who is harshly critical of Pope Francis. “Francis was very quiet about the abusive priests, but now the sentence is coming,” he said. “I know that the Pope is afraid because the deaf have been brave.”
CNA said that Pope Francis, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, led the Argentine bishops’ conference when the alleged crimes were reported in 2009 and 2010, and that he was specifically told about Corradi in 2014.
Crux asked “why Francis did not remove Corradi as the authority at the Mendoza school once he learned of the allegations in Verona”.
LifeSite said: “Pope Francis and other Church authorities are being criticised for moving too slowly with regard to the accusations.”
