7 Marzo 2022 Pubblicato da Marco Tosatti

Marco Tosatti

Dear friends and foes of Stilum Curiae, the tribunal of Orán, in Argentina, has found the Bishope Emeritus of Oran, Msgr. Gustave Zanchetta, guilty of the crime of sexual abuse, and has condemned him to four years and six months of imprisonment.

According to the daily El Tribuno, the judges in charge of the trial in the city of Orán, María Laura Toledo Zamora, Raúl Fernando López and Héctor Fabián Fayos, found Zanchetta guilty of “the crime of continuous and simple sexual abuse aggravated by being committed by a recognized religious minister to the detriment of GG and M.C.

The judges decided on the immediate arrest of the Bishop and that, once the sentence has become final, he should be registered “in the Genetic Data Bank.”

The journalist Silvia Noviatsky posted on Twitter a photo in which she comments that “the relatives and friends of seminarians are crying outside” the court because the sentence against Zanchetta “was very small compsred to the damage he caused.”

Zanchetta’s trial began on 21 February. Zanchetta denied the accusations of sexual abuse, but the victims confirmed their accusations, which included amorous propositions and the prelate’s request for massages.

Msgr. Zanchetta is undergoing a canonical trial in the Vatican; in February 2019 the Congregation for Bishops entrusted to the Archbishop of Tucumán (Argentina), Msgr. Carlos Alberto Sánchez, the task of a preliminary investigation of the denunciations against Msgr. Zanchetta, accused of sexual abuse and abuse of power. The case then passed to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, charged with handling these cases.

For Msgr. Zanchetta, who had disappeared from his diocese, blaming health problems, the Vatican had created a new position of “assessor” of the Administration of the Apostolic See (APSA), a totally new position, which Zanchetta held until October 2021.

In an interview with Valentina Alazraki the pope said that some people described Bishop Zanchetta as a “despot, a bully…well, the economic management of things is not entirely clear, it seems, this is not proven. But certainly the clergy did not feel well treated by him,” for which reason “as clergy they presented complaints to the Nunciature.”

In this sense, the Pope said that he had called the Nunciature and the Nuncio and emphasized that “the complaint is serious, for mistreatment, for abuse of power we could say, no?”; so he sent Msgr. Zanchetta to Spain “to do a psychiatric test.” The Pope said that “the test result was normal” and they advised him to do therapy once a month in Madrid, and for this reason Msgr. Zanchetta did not return to Argentina.

Francis explained that after receiving the results of the investigation that was carried out on Msgr. Zanchetta in 2019, “I saw that a trial was necessary. Thus I passed the matter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where they are doing a trial.”

At the moment, the Vatican has not announced whether or not there will be a declaration on the sentence against Msgr. Zanchetta.

Zanchetta, who had worked in close contact with Cardinal Bergoglio when he was president of the Argentine Bishops’ Conference, had been one of his first episcopal appointments after his election to the Throne of Peter. I dedicated a chapter of my book “Neo-Vatican Gallery” to Gustavo Zanchetta and his strange relationship with the pope.

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Tag: banchetta, papa

Categoria: Generale