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February 24, 2021 Today in the Vatican Tribunal, chaired by Giuseppe Pignatone, some witnesses were heard in the trial on the alleged abuses of the Saint Pius X preseminary. Four testified.
Two other heads absent.
The Preseminary of San Pio X, inside the Vatican walls, wanted by Pius XII in 1956, was entrusted to Don Giovanni Folci, a priest of the diocese of Como.
The structure hosts middle school and high school students who want to understand if they are called to the priestly life.
The boys are the "altar boys of the Pope".
The management of the Preseminary is entrusted to the Opera Don Folci and to the diocese of Como.
On Thursday, in fact, the bishop of Como, Oscar Cantoni, will be heard as a witness, while the emeritus, Diego Coletti, presented a medical certificate (he has "problems with cognitive impairment and high diabetes") and therefore will not testify.
The testimonies
From the stories of the former students it emerged that the Preseminary was "an unhealthy environment" where "homosexual jokes were frequent" as well as the feminine nicknames, also referred to some cardinals and bishops of the Curia to allude to their homosexuality .
Each of the boys had a nickname.
Two priests sit on the dock, Don Gabriele Martinelli and Don Enrico Radice, the latter rector at the time of the events, in 2012, one accused of abuse, the other of aiding and abetting.
In this the accused Don Gabriele Martinelli is defined as the person to whom the former Rector Don Enrico Radice had in fact delegated many roles, bypassing the other two priests who were part of the formation team (Don Marco Granoli and Don Ambrogio Marinoni).
According to Flaminio Ottaviani, who attended the pre-seminary in 2010-2011, and today 34 years old, it emerges that the Rector "knew everything but covered up, turned a deaf ear", "talking to the Rector was making an own goal because Gabriel was his protege" adds.
"Cardinal Comastri also knew everything and never did anything".
Ottaviani reported that he had once been attracted by the noises in the room of another former pre-seminarian to whom the accused seemed to feel a strong attraction.
Arriving in the room, the witness saw Martinelli chasing boys and, at the end of the game, grabbing a boy's private parts "as an implicit request for sexual intercourse".
The boy refused the advance and since then "has fallen out of favor", "marginalized" and psychologically pressured to the point of having to abandon the St. Pius X.
The witness then told that the alleged victim, in turn, had delivered a letter asking him the favor of sending it to the Pope: but he did not do so because he did not hear from it and did not have the opportunity.
The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors
The Commission was informed of the allegations of sexual abuse that would have occurred in the Vatican preseminary.
Father Pierre Paul, master of the Giulia Chapel and priest of St. Peter's Basilica, said he had received some confidences from the alleged victim about the sexual abuse that would have occurred in 2012: "He never explicitly told me what was wrong but it was understood that they were problems of the affective-sexual sphere ", said the priest.
Father Paul in 2017 made a report to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, a body now incardinated in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
He wanted to do it much earlier but the victim stopped him because he wanted to "put a story stone" on this whole thing.
Then Father Pierre Paul wrote.
The Vatican press office
In September last year it was announced that the promoter of justice of the Vatican State Court, that is the prosecutor, had requested the indictment of Don Gabriele Martinelli respectively, on charges of sexual abuse that would have occurred in the Preseminary of Saint Pius X in years prior to 2012, and of Don Enrico Radice, rector of the Preseminary at the time of the events, with the accusation of aiding and abetting.
The investigations
were launched in November 2017 following news disclosed by the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi and the television program "Le Iene".
Although the facts reported date back to years in which the law in force at the time prevented the trial in the absence of a complaint from the injured person to be presented within one year of the disputed facts, the trial was possible by virtue of a special provision of the Pope, which has removed the cause of inadmissibility.