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The Web’s Dark
Secret
By Rod Nordland and Jeffrey Bartholet
NEWSWEEK
March 19 issue — Father Fortunato Di Noto counts himself as
having once been among the innocent, or at least the
blissfully ignorant. He is everything you might expect an
Italian priest to be: portly, balding, popular among the
local kids, prone to passionate bursts of indignation.
He wears a floor-length black cassock, and sometimes props
his glasses low on his nose, so his blue eyes gleam over the
rims with added intensity. His parish church, the Madonna
del Carmine, occupies a square in an old part of Avola, a
small coastal town in Sicily. The neighboring buildings,
chipped and peeling, have empty holes for windows. The
outside of Father Fortunato’s church is drab concrete.
Inside, overhanging the pews and altar, is a garish modern
painting portraying the seven deadly sins. A group of
children has gathered in a small wooden alcove for a Bible
class. Beyond them, in a small back office, two boys are
playing Super Mario Brothers on a computer.
It was here, by grim happenstance in 1996, that Father
Fortunato experienced an epiphany. He had begun to offer an
Internet course to parish children, believing it was a vital
learning tool. During one of the first meetings of his
informal study group, a little girl said she wanted to
search for “lollipops.” Using an Italian slang word for
lollipop— slurpy —Father Fortunato punched the letters into
the search engine. But slurpy is also slang for a sex act;
what came back was a connection to an outfit called the
Pedophile Liberation Front, which defends the lifestyle of
pedophiles—people who are sexually attracted to children.
Through that link, Father Fortunato found other sites, and
discovered letters addressed to kids attempting to lure them
into relationships. “I’m lucky because I have faith,” says
the priest. “If I didn’t, I’m sure I would have gone out
there with a machine gun and taken justice in my own hands.”
Click to see remainder of article -
NEWSWEEK March 19, 2001
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