Three former students at a school for the deaf in Argentina traveled to Rome to demand Pope Francis and Vatican officials release records on priests who abused them and other students.
Speaking to journalists at a news conference in Rome Feb. 20, Daniel Sgardelis, who was abused at the Provolo Institute for the Deaf in La Plata, Argentina, said he wants an international law that would force “the Vatican to stop covering up, to definitively change the situation.”
“We need this to change. Enough!” Sgardelis said through an interpreter. “It’s been a long time — 50 years — and it’s still the same. We are victims and there is still a long way for this to change. We need for them to give us evidence.”
Sgardelis was accompanied by Ezequiel Villalonga and Claudia Labeguerie, two survivors of the institute’s sister school in Mendoza. Their interpreter, Erica Labeguerie, is Claudia’s sister.
The survivors were in Rome after a recent visit to U.N. headquarters in Geneva, where they informed the U.N. Committee Against Torture about their sufferings at the schools.
Read more at Catholic News Service
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