Photo: Still from Bel Ami’s Scandal in the Vatican.
Don Patrizio Poggi, a former parish priest at San Filippo Neri church in Rome who served a five-year prison sentence for sexually abusing teenage boys, has told Italian authorities that pedophilia in the Vatican is still rampant.
He alleges that a former Carabinieri (the military police of Italy) pimped boys to nine clergymen. Poggi says the policeman worked with an accountant and a friend who ran a modelling agency, which they used to find mainly underage Eastern European immigrants outside discos, saunas and gyms across Rome. They lured the boys into the sex ring by “false work offers for modelling and acting roles,” Poggi claims. The boys were paid 150 to 500 euros ($200-650) to perform sex acts in churches across the capital.
Poggi names one gay bar in particular, Twinks, where he says the policeman would recruit boys, waiting for them outside the club in his Fiat Panda, which was marked “Emergency Blood” to avoid parking fines.
Poggi also accuses the former Carabinieri of selling consecrated hosts for satanic rites.
Italian officials were reportedly given documentary and photographic evidence by Poggi in the company of two senior Vatican clergymen, who vouched for his credibility. Poggi identified the nine clergymen, who include two senior church officials and a religion lecturer. Three people have been put under formal investigation.
The Vatican is denying the allegations, naturally. Cardinal Agostino Vallini, head of the Catholic Vicariate of Rome, says that fallen priest Poggi is a scorned man out for vengeance.
“The cardinal expresses his full confidence in the magistracy and declares himself full convinced that this slander will be demolished, demonstrating Poggi’s claims to be untrue,” Vallini declared.“God will hold everyone accountable for their deeds.”
Maybe. But if these claims hold any truth, who knows what god the Vatican is referring to?
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