Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta at the 2013 announcement of his appointment as Bishop of Oran. Credit: Canal 11/youtube.Posted on 03/04/2022 7:26:49 PM PST by ebb tide
The former Bishop of Oran, Argentina, was sentenced Friday to four and a half years in prison for the sexual abuse of two former seminarians. Bishop Gustavo Oscar Zanchetta was convicted of simple sexual abuse aggravated by his position as a minister of religion, in a decision handed down by judges in his former diocese.
The bishop returned to Argentina in the summer of 2021 to face the charges, after he spent years living and working in the Vatican. After Zanchetta resigned from diocesan leadership in scandal, Pope Francis created a special post for the bishop in APSA, the Holy See’s sovereign asset manager and reserve bank.
Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta at the 2013 announcement of his appointment as Bishop of Oran. Credit: Canal 11/youtube.After he was sentenced Friday, Zanchetta was remanded directly to the custody of corrections officials; he will be immediately held in a regional facility and transferred within days to the Argentine prison where he will serve his sentence.
Zanchetta’s trial took place over three weeks. While the bishop pled not guilty and maintained his innocence, victims and witnesses testified that in 2016, Zanchetta abused seminarians at John XXIII Seminary, and at his own residence.
In addition to particular abuses, the bishop serially pressured seminarians to engage in sexual conduct, displayed pornographic selfies and other images on his phone, and pushed seminarians for massages and other contact while supplying them with alcohol, according to testimony at trial.
Argentine prosecutors had requested that Zanchetta be sentenced to more than four years incarceration, telling judges Thursday that trial testimony established “the veracity, plausibility, and credibility of the victims.”
Zanchetta’s trial followed years of allegations against the bishop concerning sexual misconduct, as well as financial impropriety during his tenure as Bishop of Oran.
Born in 1964, Zanchetta was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Quilmes in 1991. He later served as executive undersecretary of the Argentine bishops’ conference, and in that role he worked closely with then-Cardinal Jorge Bergolio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, who led the conference from 2005-2011.
In 2013, the newly-elected Pope Francis appointed Zanchetta the Bishop of Oran, one of the first episcopal nominations made by the pope. In 2017, Zanchetta resigned from that office at the age of 53 — 22 years before the normal age.
Zanchetta initially cited health reasons for his early retirement, though it later emerged that senior clergy in the diocese had complained, for years, about the bishop’s conduct, leading to charges of “aggravated continuous sexual abuse” of two adult seminarians for which he was convicted on March 4.
In January 2019, the Vatican announced that it had received complaints of sexual abuse against Zanchetta months earlier, in late 2018.
But later that month, Zanchetta’s former vicar general in Oran, Fr. Juan Jose Manzano, told the AP that the Vatican had been presented with allegations of sexual abuse of seminarians and financial misconduct by Zanchetta as early as 2015, and again in 2017, shortly before the bishop presented his resignation to Pope Francis.
Manzano said that as early as 2015, Church authorities were alerted that Zanchetta had sent sexually explicit “selfies” on his cell phone, and received “obscene” images of young men engaged in sexual contact. The images reportedly came to light after they were discovered by an archdiocesan secretary.
The allegations were substantially supported by a February 2019 report in The Tribune, a local Argentine newspaper, which published documents apparently illustrating that a formal complaint had been made against Zanchetta by three of his diocesan vicars, including Manzano, as well as by two other senior diocesan priests, and that Pope Francis had summoned the bishop to Rome to discuss the matter.
According to Manzano, “the Holy Father summoned Zanchetta [to Rome] and he justified himself saying that his cellphone had been hacked, and that there were people who were out to damage the image of the pope.”
Ping
That’s about two degrees of Pope Soros.
The Roman Catholic Church is as anti-Christian as it gets. I have always thought that its priesthood was a haven for deviants who were boy loving homosexuals. It gave them perfect cover for not being married and provided fresh supplies of victims. The Vatican is at the very heart of this evil and should be bombed to rubble, with the evil pope inside.
bring back public hanging.
How very Christian of you. I will pray for you.
Sadly this lowlife homosexual is not the only lowlife, predatory homosexual to wear a collar or hold high rank in the Church. Sinful men permeate the Church.
I suspect not many will understand it.
He sounds like a creepoid and has no business being in that position as an “out” gay, but how old were these seminarians and did he do any overt acts with these guys? Or was it just porn and massages??
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