Gifts in exchange for sexual abuse of his altar boy. For years, Father Andrea Melis
continued to sexually abuse a young boy, buying his gratitude and his silence. Designer clothes, electronic cigarettes, recharges on prepaid cards, video games, smartphones: a long list of gifts to
convince the little boy – also because of his clerical authority – to follow him to the apartments that the curia had made available to him. According to the prosecution, every time they saw each other, the parish priest gave him 100 or 200 euros (a total of 5 thousand euros on a card in the boy’s name), in addition to the long series of gifts to guarantee himself the possibility of being able to continue to act in secret. For over three years – according to the prosecution – he made the boy suffer sexual abuse, pushing him to lie to his parents and to treat him as if he were his boyfriend.
The family members had sensed and told the boy not to accept anything. But secretly from the parents, the meetings had continued.
When the boy, at 16, moved to Genoa to study, the relationships continued here. The meetings took place in the apartment made available inside the school complex where he taught and was director.
Among his former students there were also two young men who had dodged an attempted sexual approach in exchange for an electronic cigarette. The parish priest, according to the judge who ordered house arrest, acted under the “drive of perverse impulses”, gaining the trust of the “kids, luring them to his house, near the churches” and making them “access to everything that an adult forbids”. And his dangerousness, according to the judge, “is not exclusively connected to his role as a priest and teacher, from which he is suspended, but also to his ability, acquired precisely as a result of the professions he carries out, to approach minors, to make himself understood by them, acting as their friend and accomplice”.
From the searches carried out by the Carabinieri at the home of Father Andrea Melis, an apartment in the city centre, significant material was found for the investigations: sexual objects, drugs for sexual stimulation, clothes for boys, a stock of e-cigs and some notes that confirm the long-standing relationship with the young man. The arrest was triggered after the interrogations of the boy, now 16, and other teenagers.
The priest, 60 years old, originally from Cagliari but transplanted to Liguria for years, ended up under house arrest. He is accused of sexual violence on a minor who was just 12 years old when the events began. But there will be further investigative developments because the priest is also under investigation for child prostitution and attempted aggravated sexual violence on other children.
A member of the order of the Piarist Fathers, Father Andrea Melis is a very well-known figure in the social sphere in Genoa and Liguria. Before being suspended from the curia, he was president of Fidae Liguria, the federation of Catholic schools, as well as director of the Padre Assarotti nursery and elementary school in Salita San Bartolomeo degli Armeni, but also parish priest assigned to the church of Sant’Antonio da Padova in Finale Ligure.
