CAUTION: This is not for the faint of heart. A stunning video documentary of the atrocities committed at the Catholic Provolo Institute for the Deaf in Argentina has just been released. It contains interview with deaf students, who, because of the advances in hearing aid technology, are now able to speak of the terrible ordeals they endured from a number of priests at the school. It then shifts to a nursing home facility Verona, Italy, where one of the Institute's retired priests, Don Piccoli, resides and records a gripping sick-bed conversation between the former students and the elderly priest.
This is the stuff of nightmares. The gaunt priest with hands clasped and rosary around his neck, proceeds to confirm the claims presented by the accusers and, unbelievably laughs and leers and jokes about the details, dismissing them as trivialities.
A further breakdown with captured stills from the video is available at Hilary White's blog, What'sUpWithFrancisChurch, for those who don't have the stomach to watch. I could only watch about 3 minutes before I wanted to punch something.
Hilary also provides much-needed commentary on the longstanding phenomenon of "dirty old men" in the Catholic priesthood.
I’ve been covering these men a long time. Very little of any of this has been a surprise. After 20-odd years you get an ear for the kind of things they say and start to be able to anticipate the kinds of things they’ll do. You get a feel – like a psychological profiler – for the mindset, and this is it. This is the kind of dirty minded old men they all are. Some of them have more polished manners and can be trusted to be put in front of cameras. These ones usually become bishops.
And you can’t call it the fault of Vatican II. This is an old fashioned, unreconstructed Italian pervert-priest of the old school. The kind we used to just call “a dirty old man”. This is the kind of guy who went into the priesthood out of convenience in a Catholic culture – among the laity – that just shrugs and accepts it as par for the course. How old is he? He didn’t go to seminary in the ’70s. He wasn’t in a Pink Palace in a US diocese.
This isn’t VaticanTwoism. This has nothing to do with our polemical arguments.
This is just straight up moral decay of a corrupt Church, a system that provides opportunities and life-long cover to men who just like to “unload” into any nearby handy bit of flesh that happens to pass within arm’s reach
It has to come down. The whole thing – rotten to the core – has to come down. And I don’t just mean the Church.
Very sobering revelations here, and there may be worse to come.
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KosherHiveKicker ago
The Catholic Church needs to go public, and purge it's ranks of all these fucking pedo's. They must also assist in putting every single one of them away for life.
Vindicator ago
Actually, KHK, naming and punishing them all IS Mercy -- obviously for the victims, faithful Catholics and good priests. But also for these fuckers themselves. These demonic assholes have become completely enslaved to their vices. Any punishment they receive here on earth that stops their behavior, even capital punishment that might force them to face the reality of who they are on the way to stand before the Big Chair fits squarely within the theological virtue of Mercy.
Hell is going to blaze like a weenie roast in shingle mill when these guys get there.