The growing scandal about child abuse reaches the top of the Vatican

A SUBTLY disquieting photograph greets visitors to the website of the northern Italian diocese of Bozen-Brixen. The dark recesses of a sunken passageway end in a flight of steps leading to daylight. A click leads to an e-mail address for reporting sexual or physical abuse by priests. The first person to use it spoke anonymously to the newspaper Corriere della Sera. As a wartime evacuee, he recalled how a village curate “felt my trousers, tried to kiss me and asked me to caress him”. His younger brother told him the priest was still molesting boys 13 years later.

The web initiative has recently been praised as an exercise in openness and may be extended to other parts of Italy. Yet the e-mail address had long been on the site, and came to prominence only amid the mushrooming worldwide scandal involving hundreds of people molested by priests or in church-run institutions. …