Seminary stories: "I, started with sex from my superior"
Article published on the website of Il Fatto Quotidiano on 30 June 2018
Room of a seminar in Northern Italy, autumn afternoon, immediately after the resumption of the school. The fourteen year old Carlo and his spiritual father are lying close to the bed, when the Don gets off and rushes to the bathroom, at the bottom of the long corridor of his apartment. After a few moments, Carlo decides to follow him, he fears that he does not feel good, that he may need help. When he arrives in front of the sworn door of the bathroom, however, the show that is in front of him is not that of an adult who is sick, but of a man in the grip of a furious excitement.
Thus begins one of the many stories of the seminar, sex and repressed homosexuality collected over the years by Marco Marzano, sociologist of the University of Bergamo and collaborator of the daily fact, who in the number of FQ Millennium currently on newsstands offers an unpublished cross -section on a world for the more inaccessible. The seminar, Marzano writes "It is a total institution that, like the barracks or prison, has as its objective not the simple theological formation of the clergy, because this could also do universities or theological faculties, but the construction of the character and identity of the future priests ". But it is also a place where, to the exact contrary to what is preached by the Catholic Church, the intimate relationships between priests and young aspiring are often known and tolerated: the "particular friendship" between Carlo and Don Mario "is known to everyone In the seminary and arouses many jealousies and mischievous jokes among the companions. Even the superiors notice, but nobody is scandalized, nobody thinks it is the case to intervene".
A question that in Italy remains in silence, but which according to several international research has a strong link with the frequent scandals with a sexual background, including pedophilia. It is the "Sexual Underworld", the sexual submond of seminars and clerical life in general, of which the Australian scholar Barry M. Colrey wrote. It is the clerical-homosexual subculture, as Mary Gail Fratwley-O'Daa (her book described her Impure acts. The plague of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church It was published in Italy by Raffaello Cortina Editore in 2008). And so on. A question that, underlines Marzano in his latest book The immobile-French church and the missed revolution (Laterza), not even Pope Bergoglio managed to face.
Thus, writes the sociologist by recalling the stories collected for his studies, "Each can find, over time, one of his ways: there are those who decide to have a double life, a secret and stable love, there are those who decide to jump from flower to flower by capturing all the opportunities that present themselves, there They are also those who, and are not few, decide to solve the problem with a heroic self -mutilation of their sexuality".
Carlo, the protagonist of the story, abandoned his religious life today lives with Giulio, his future husband.
