Ex-Priest, Sentenced for Pedophilia, Is Given Transitory Release Clarín November 6, 2012 [Translated into English by BishopAccountability.org. Click below to see original article in Spanish.] http://www.bishopaccountability.org/Argentina/news/2012_11_06_Clarin_Ex_Priest_Sentenced_re_Sasso_SASSO_Spanish.pdf The ex-priest, Mario Napoleón Sasso, one of the first priests in the country sentenced for abuse of minors, when he was parish priest of the chapel of the Buenos Aires locality of La Lonja, in Pilar, was granted transitory release. According to judicial sources today, the ruling that permits Sasso to leave jail, was made last week by the Court of Appeals and Investigations of San Isidro and carries the signatures of judges Celia Margarita Vázquez and Gustavo Herbel. The Criminal Tribunal of San Isidro, that in 2007 sentenced Sasso to 17 years in prison for abusing in the chapel five girls who were between 7 and 14 years old, raised its opposition to the transitory release. But on the orders of the superior justices of the Court, the release order went into effect beginning last week. The judicial sources indicated that the Criminal Tribunal of San Isidro managed that Sasso be given minimal privileges: 24-hour transitory release once a month, naming as guarantor Sasso’s wife, Argentina Graciela Inés Miño, whom he married in 2007 while waiting in prison for the oral argument. The 24-hour transitory release once a month will be in Miño, in the city of La Plata, according to judicial spokespersons who spoke with Télam. Sasso was given the transitory releases because as of this year he’d served half his sentence, since the Court reduced the sentence that had been given in his trial to 16 years in prison, and he has served 8 years since 2004. In the oral argument, it was shown that between 2002 and 2003, Sasso, the only priest at the chapel of San Miguel de La Lonja, where there was a soup kitchen, offered candy to the girls and invited them to watch television in his room, where he undressed them, groped them, and masturbated in front of them. There the police recovered used prophylactics and child pornography that Sasso had stored on his computer and in pedophile magazines, which, according to what was verified in the trial, he let the girls look at while he abused them. At the conclusion of the trial, the Criminal Tribunal of San Isidro convicted Sasso of “sexual abuse, doubly compounded by the injurious sexual submission of the victims and his standing as minister of religious worship.” The case began in November 2003, with the denouncement by a catechist of the parish, who found out about the situation from one of the girls. The then-prosecutor of Pilar, Enrique Ferrari – who is today a judge in Lomas de Zamora – along with the Investigative Judge of San Isidro, Orlando Díaz, issued an order of detention against Sasso that went into effect on January 20, 2004. The priest eluded their international order of detention for more than a month and a half, changed his physiognomy so as not to be recognized, and traveled to Paraguay, where he remained for 10 days as a fugitive, after which he returned to the country and was detained. Sasso already had clinical antecedents of pedophilia at the diocese of San Juan, also his place of origin. The ecclesial authorities had sent him to get treatment between 1996 and 1998 at Domus Mariae de Tortuguitas, an institution for priests with behavioral problems.

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