Bishop praised by pope ‘facing Vatican probe’ and perjury trial

Bishop Rosario Gisana will be the first Italian bishop to face trial over the handling of an abuse case

An Italian bishop praised by Pope Francis is facing a Vatican investigation and a civil trial for perjury, local media reported Tuesday.

Bishop Rosario Gisana of Piazza Armerina, Italy. Peppe Ferreri & Sons Photographers - Diocesi di Piazza Armerina via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Vatican reportedly sent an apostolic visitor to Sicily to assess accusations against Bishop Rosario Gisana of Piazza Armerina after a public prosecutor decided he should stand trial for perjury.

According to Rome’s Il Messaggero newspaper, Gisana will be the first Italian bishop to face trial over the handling of an abuse case.

The public prosecutor in Enna, central Sicily, ordered Gisana and the Diocese of Piazza Armerina’s judicial vicar Msgr. Vincenzo Murgano to answer an accusation of giving false testimony in the trial of Fr. Giuseppe Rugolo.

A court in Enna sentenced Rugolo in the first instance on March 5, 2024, to four years and six months for sexual violence and attempted sexual violence against minors.

The court also ruled that Gisana had failed to exercise proper oversight of a priest convicted of sexual abuse — a claim rejected by the bishop.

In a Jan. 21 statement, the Piazza Armerina diocese said Gisana was “calmly following developments in the ongoing criminal proceedings.”

“While reaffirming his denial of the accusations, he reiterates his confidence in the judiciary’s work,” the diocese said.

The statement did not address media reports of a Vatican investigation. The Vatican has also not commented on the reports.

In cases involving a police investigation and civil trial, the Vatican typically authorizes a preliminary canonical investigation, a minimal process which does not involve a full gathering of evidence, to assess only whether there is sufficient evidence to justify opening a full canonical process to evaluate and adjudicate the accusations.

The canonical process is then usually paused until the end of the civil proceedings, to prevent the parallel processes interfering with each other, after which it may be reactivated.

Sicilian media said a canonical investigator visited the Piazza Armerina diocese Jan. 15-18 to assess the actions of priests, as well as the bishop, in the Rugolo case.

The case emerged around 2018, when Antonio Messina, an archeologist now in his 30s, sent a written complaint to the diocese, accusing the priest of sexually abusing him when he was a minor. Italian media reports said Messina also alleged that Rugolo, a former religion teacher, had abused other minors.

After launching an “investigatio praevia,” or preliminary investigation, in 2019, Gisana transferred Rugolo to Ferrara in northern Italy.

Italian media reports alleged that the reason given for the transfer was ill health and Rugolo worked with children aged 14 to 19 in the new location.

But Gisana told Italy’s La Stampa newspaper in July 2024 he had taken appropriate steps after he became aware of the accusations against the priest.

He said: “Having become aware of what Antonio Messina presented, I immediately ordered an investigatio praevia that constituted a dutiful moment of verification of what young Messina claimed; as a result of this investigatio, Rugolo’s installation as a parish priest was suspended and he was sent to Ferrara for the reasons expressed in the measure taken at the time.”

In October 2020, Messina reportedly wrote to Pope Francis, expressing frustration at the slow pace of the process.

That year, Messina told police in Enna that Rugolo had sexually abused him between 2009 and 2013, which Rugolo denied.

In April 2021, Rugolo was arrested on charges of aggravated sexual violence against minors. A trial began in October of that year.

According to Italian media reports in November 2021, police intercepted a call between Gisana and Rugolo, in which the bishop is said to have told the priest: “Now the problem is not just yours, the problem is also mine because I buried this story.”

In his La Stampa interview, Gisana complained that the word “buried” — “insabbiato” in Italian, which can also be translated as “covered up” — had been “decontextualized several times from the dialogue in which it was uttered.”

“I therefore acted based on what I could know at the time of the events and gave full collaboration to the investigating judicial authority,” said Gisana.

The diocese has previously accused media of misrepresenting recorded exchanges between Gisana and Rugolo.

Gisana, who was ordained Bishop of Piazza Armerina in April 2014, told La Stampa: “The facts relating to this matter all took place before 2019, applying the canonical discipline in force at the time. The apostolic letter Vos estis lux mundi was issued by Pope Francis in the form of a motu proprio on May 9, 2019, and updated on March 23, 2023.”

The apostolic letter requires bishops to meet all “obligations established in each place by state laws, particularly those concerning any reporting obligations to the competent civil authorities.”

Vos estis also says it is a canonical crime for bishops to engage in “actions or omissions intended to interfere with or avoid civil investigations or canonical investigations.”

In a November 2023 address to Catholics from Sicily, Pope Francis singled out Gisana for praise.

He said: “I greet Bishop Rosario Gisana of Piazza Armerina: he is good, this bishop, good. He was persecuted, slandered, yet he stood firm, always, just, a just man.”

The pope noted that when he visited Sicily’s capital, Palermo, in 2018, he stopped first at Piazza Armerina to greet the bishop. He did not elaborate on why he described the bishop as “persecuted” and “slandered.”

Lay people have held protests against Gisana and launched a petition calling for his resignation.

Local media say the bishop and his judicial vicar are due to appear in court before judge Maria Rosaria Santoni in Enna May 26.

The Italian Church has faced increasing scrutiny of its handling of abuse cases in recent years.

In November 2022, the Italian bishops’ conference published its first abuse assessment. Examining the period from 2020 to 2021, it identified 68 alleged abusers in Italy’s 226 dioceses.

This week, the Diocese of Bolzano-Brixen became the first Italian diocese to publish an independent review of its handling of abuse allegations over several decades.

The study released Jan. 20 found 67 references in personnel files to cases of possible sexual assault in the northern Italian diocese from 1964 to 2023.