Roman Catholic priest who sexually abused a 13-year-old girl, released from prison. How much of the four-year sentence he served

The Vaslui court decided on Monday the conditional release of the Roman Catholic priest Augustin Benchea, from Bacău, sentenced to 4 years in prison, in 2024, after he sexually assaulted a girl in the parish where he served. The court rejected the challenge of the prosecutors who opposed the early release.

• PressOne revealed that the priest's superiors knew about the sexual abuse, sent the case to the Vatican and applied canonical sanctions, but did not notify the authorities, who intervened only later.

The Vaslui Court rejected as unfounded the appeal of the prosecutors against the decision of the Vaslui Court which decided to release the priest on parole since January, according to the minutes published on the court portal.

Augustin Benchea is to leave Vaslui Penitentiary, where he served his sentence, on Monday, local sources told HotNews.

The court established that, in the interval between the date of conditional release and the date of completion of the sentence, Augustin Benchea must comply with a supervision program. The judge drew the attention of the former priest “to his future conduct and the consequences to which he is exposed, if he commits more crimes”.

Augustin Benchea has been behind bars since July 2023, when the Bacău courts decided on his preventive arrest for continued sexual assault.

Later, in July 2024, he was definitively sentenced to 4 years in prison with execution for continued sexual assault on a 13-year-old minor from Cleja parish, Bacău county, where he served.

In court, the priest defended himself by claiming that the victim had consented to the sexual acts.

The case covered up by the Vatican and the bishopric

PressOne revealed that the Roman Catholic bishop of Iași, Iosif Păuleț, learned in 2022 that a priest under his command had sexually abused a 13-year-old minor, canonically sanctioned, but did not notify the Police or the Prosecutor's Office.

The documents in the criminal file show that, before the Romanian state found out and intervened, the case was handled exclusively within the Catholic Church, through canonical procedures initiated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Iași and later validated even by the Vatican.

One day after the revelations made by the journalist Emilia Șercan in PressOne, the Prosecutor's Office attached to the Bacău Court filed an ex officio complaint and opened the criminal case for failure to report. The case was taken over on the same day by the Prosecutor's Office attached to the Bacău Court of Appeal.

When the investigators investigated the case of sexual assault on the minor, in 2023, they did not investigate the possible crime of non-reporting, provided by art. 266 of the Criminal Code.