Reports of sexual abuse, whether true—as prosecutors alleged—or false—as Don Ettore maintained—couldn’t be boiled down to a power struggle between Communists and Catholics, no matter how prominent that struggle had been in the postwar era. I didn’t know all the details of the case yet, but I expected that the logic behind it would either be simpler and more linear, or much more complex and multifaceted, than what I was hearing from this elderly priest in black garb, with a kind expression.
