Catholic Church set to reinstate Italian priest who was jailed for child molestation
A religious court found the priest not guilty even though Italy’s appeals court had previously sentenced him to jail for child molestation
In a situation the Italian press has described as “Kafka-esque,” a priest who was sentenced to 7 years in prison for child molestation could soon be saying Mass again after an ecclesiastical court found him innocent of the same charges that led to a conviction in civil court.
Italy’s highest court of appeals, the Court of Cassation, found former priest Luciano Massaferro guilty of molesting a 12-year-old girl altar server in 2009 and sentenced him to 7 years, 8 months’ in prison. He served just over 6 years in prison before being released early for good behavior in March of 2016.
In the meantime, the Catholic Church’s ecclesiastical court in Genova held its own four-year criminal trial into the matter. This week the Court cleared the former parish priest from Alessio of any wrongdoing and said he must be allowed to return to his former ecclesiastical duties — prison sentence notwithstanding.
“[Massaferro] must be completely reinstated as he did not commit the crimes attributed to him,” the decision said.
The religious court’s decision has no bearing on the state trial and did not impact Massaferro’s prison sentence. But by clearing the former priest of any wrongdoing based on its own investigation, the church has paved the way for a convicted child molester to be fully reinstated as a priest.
“Due to the Court of Cassation’s sentence father Luciano is prohibited from holding a public-sector job,” his lawyer, Alessandro Chirivì, explained to the newspaper Corriere della Sera. “He can’t hold political office, he can’t teach, he can’t be appointed as a guardian. But for the Church he’s completely innocent and could soon be given a new posting.”
This “Kafka-esque” situation, as the Corriere described it, has led some observers to stop and question a paradoxical situation that prioritizes the church’s legal sovereignty over child safety.
Although Italy is a secular liberal democracy, the Catholic Church enjoys a special legal relationship with the state that is governed by the Lateran Accords, the 1929 treaty that recognized the Vatican City as an independent state.
The treaty’s roots actually stretch back even further than 1929 — to the 1860s, when the modern state of Italy was formed by unifying various independent states up and down the Italian peninsula. At the time the Catholic Church was both a religious and a political power. It controlled a territory surrounding Rome called the “Papal States” and was the last region to be integrated into the newly unified state of Italy. Rome was annexed against the Pope’s will in 1870, leading to 60 years of hostile relations between the Church and the new state.
In 1929, then-Prime Minister Benito Mussolini sought to resolve the “Roman Question” by negotiating an agreement that created a separate, neutral state and granted full and independent sovereignty to the Holy See.
The Roman Curia, the Vatican’s administrative branch, oversees a system of courts spread across the country that interprets and applies Catholic law, also known as canon law. The 1983 Code of Canon Law includes a religious equivalent to secular criminal law and gives the ecclesiastical courts the power to collect evidence and solicit testimony — which it did in Massaferro’s case.
While the state found that the victim’s story held up in court, the religious court said it lacked “external confirmation” and was illogical in some places, Massaferro’s attorney said. Massaferro himself has maintained his innocence, writing up to 100 letters from prison saying he never molested the girl.
Sign up to receive Kheiro Magazine straight to your inbox.
