An Argentinian priest convicted of sexually abusing two minor seminarians in a parish in a town in the south of the country was sentenced to 17 years in prison on Wednesday.
The trials took place between 2009 and 2012 in the parish of Puerto Santa Cruz, 250 kilometers from Rio Gallegos (2,500 km south of Buenos Aires), where the trial was held.
Read alsoArgentina: a pedophile priest sentenced to 17 years in prison
Nicolas Parma is the second priest of the Congregation of the “Brother disciples of Jesus Saint John the Baptist” to be sentenced for sexual abuse after the conviction of its founder, Agustin Rosa Torino, to 12 years in prison in July by a court in Salta (North ). In pre-trial detention since 2018, Mr. Parma followed the hearing from a distance. His lawyer, Me Cristian Ariel, has announced that he will appeal the judgment. One of the two victims had testified in the press and declared to be only
"the visible faces"
of these attacks, ensuring to be
"certain that there were many more abused minors".
“We experienced horror in this place. We were moral prisoners, we couldn't think, it was impossible to leave, I had started to think about suicide, ”
the young man, now 26, told
La Nacion
newspaper
.
Argentina had already been shocked by the scandal of rapes committed against deaf children in specialized Catholic institutes.
40-year prison sentences were handed down in 2019 against their perpetrators.
Last June, the Catholic Church included in its domestic law an explicit article on sexual crimes committed by priests against minors, an addition long demanded by victims of pedophilia.