The Rev. Fortunato Di Noto, founder and president of the Meter Association, says that his immersion in the horrific world of pedophilia has not triggered any depression or inclination to call it quits.Fabrizio Troccoli/The Globe and Mail
In the early 1990s, when Fortunato Di Noto was studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, a chance encounter with a Canadian and an American priest changed his life.
The priests showed the young Sicilian deacon – he had not yet been ordained − images they, to their shock, had discovered by accident on the internet, a then-novel technology.
“They had brought a computer and, for the first time, I saw child sexual abuse online,” Don Fortunato said in an interview in Pachino, in Sicily’s southeast. “In that era, the internet seemed imaginary, futuristic. Yet there it was. I faced a choice: I could ignore it or ask why it was happening. I immediately understood that I had to give voices to these abused children.”
Members of the Meter Association’s staff and leadership team with the Rev. Fortunato Di Noto, centre, at Meter’s headquarters in Pachino, Sicily.Fabrizio Troccoli/The Globe and Mail
From his home base in Avola, just north of Pachino, he and some tech-savvy colleagues taught themselves to find images and videos of child abuse in the dark corners of the internet. In 2002, he formally launched the Meter Association − “meter” is the Greek word for “mother” or “womb” − and devoted his priesthood to exposing abuses and reporting them to the police in Italy and other countries, including Canada, in the hopes they would investigate and prosecute perpetrators. Some have.
Today, Don Fortunato – “don” is the friendly term for “priest” in southern Italy – and his team are considered among the world’s leading anti-child-abuse advocates. He and Meter are well known in Italy, less so internationally, and have been celebrated by popes Benedict and Francis, with the latter mentioning him and Meter in a dozen addresses and speeches and meeting with Don Fortunato several times at the Vatican.
In 2024, the year before he died, Francis told an audience, “I welcome with pleasure the Meter Association, dedicated to combatting every form of abuse against minors. Thank you, thank you for your work. Continue with courage your important mission.”
The Meter Association’s headquarters in Pachino.Fabrizio Troccoli/The Globe and Mail
Meter is housed in a former school on the outskirts of Pachino, on the hills overlooking the Ionian Sea. The building is too large for the organization’s annual budget of only a few hundred thousand euros, which comes from the Catholic Church, the Sicilian regional government and private donors. But the religious order that owned it believed in Don Fortunato’s cause and donated it to his team.
Meter has only seven full-time employees, including Don Fortunato’s younger brother, Carlo, who is director-general, and Arianna Consiglio, a psychiatrist. The others are young techies who search the internet and messaging services, notably Signal, Telegram and Viber, for pedophilia and pedo-porn sites and channels.
They work in a world that is deeply disturbing and vile. Meter says that there has been a recent explosion of “pedomama” material, the Italian term for mothers who abuse their own children, some of them babies.
The volume of the photos and videos they have found is astonishing. According to Meter’s 2025 report, the association has sent some 235,000 links to the police since 2002. Since 2014, they have uncovered more than 30 million photos and almost 12 million videos.
Meter technicians monitor online activity to help identify online predators and child sexual abuse material.Fabrizio Troccoli/The Globe and Mail
Canada does not escape scrutiny. This year alone, Meter’s techno-sleuths have found 12,000 photos and 4,500 videos from web addresses with “.ca” suffixes, indicating they were possibly of Canadian origin, though the office of Marcello La Bella, the Italian Postal and Communications Police’s head of cybersecurity in eastern Sicily, says that pedo-porn’s perpetrators often disguise the true geographic source of the material.
Meter says the “.ca” links, along with the thousands of other links, are mostly sent to the Postal police, a division of Italy’s state police, which may or may not launch criminal investigations. The vast majority of links sent to the police do not trigger investigations; the sheer volume of abusive material makes that impossible, as do the clever methods perpetrators employ to avoid detection. But more than a few do, with occasionally spectacular results.
The RCMP did not comment about its co-operation, if any, with the Italian Postal police or Meter.
An early victory for Meter (before it was officially Meter) came in the mid-1990s, when Don Fortunato found shocking images and videos produced in the shantytowns around São Paulo, Brazil, featuring a large number of children. “We went to the police in Brazil and they eventually rescued 148 children,” he said. “They were being sexually exploited, photographed and filmed, and the material was distributed in Europe. It became one of the most important early international operations of its kind.” (Several Italian, Vatican and Brazilian reports said four “prominent” Brazilians were arrested during the police raid.)
Italy’s Postal police confirmed that Meter’s discoveries have been invaluable, even though the police themselves can devote far more tech expertise and office hours to dark web and chat group surveillance than Meter can. Every little bit of detection helps, Mr. La Bella said.
Don Fortunato and his team are considered among the world’s leading anti-child-abuse advocates.Fabrizio Troccoli/The Globe and Mail
“We have a long-standing and direct relationship with Don Fortunato and Meter,” he said. “They play an extremely important role in identifying and reporting suspected child-abuse material.”
Don Fortunato, 63, is a big man with a big voice and a big appetite. A well-known personality in Pachino and in Avola, where he celebrates mass at his church every day, he is a fixture in Pachino’s coffee shops and restaurants, some of which serve horsemeat sandwiches.
An Italian journalist wrote his biography, My Battle in Defence of Children, in 2021, and the priest himself has written several books, a couple of which are based on survivors’ stories.
His enthusiasm for his mission is infectious, and he says his immersion in the horrific world of pedophilia has not triggered any depression or inclination to call it quits. “I have never surrendered to despair,” he said. “Child abuse is a form of slavery. It steals hope, it steals life. If, as a priest, I have made even a small contribution to restoring hope to a wounded child, a wounded family, then my life has had meaning.”
But his mission has never been easy. In Meter’s early years, he received almost no support from the church and felt isolated from it. “The church did not understand my work,” he said. “Some people within the church believed a priest should simply be a priest. They did not understand why a simple, poor parish priest was speaking out against pedophilia worldwide, filing reports and confronting such disturbing realities. Recognition by Benedict and Francis was a turning point for us.”
Arianna Consiglio, a psychologist and head of the Meter Association’s counselling and support centre.Fabrizio Troccoli/The Globe and Mail
There were death threats. “I learned about plans to kill me,” he said. “For 27 years, I have been under some form of protection authorized by the public security authorities. Today, the level of protection is lower, but I must communicate to the police all my travel movements, such as trips to Rome.”
Meter does more than deep dives into the dark web. Dr. Consiglio, the Meter psychiatrist whose small team also provides legal advice to survivors, said the association has worked with some 3,000 survivors since 2002. They try to rehabilitate the abused children, though sometimes the damage is so severe that full, happy lives are elusive.
“We see eating disorders, self-harm, suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts,” she said. “Some develop harmful sexual behaviour, a decline in school performance, social isolation, insomnia and serious emotional instability.”
Sometimes survivors do not reveal the abuses they endured for years, even decades, after they took place. The time distance can make it difficult to repair the emotional and psychological damage that has gripped the survivor since childhood. It can also make it difficult for the police to track down the perpetrators.
Dr. Consiglio recounted the story of a young boy who was abused by his godfather. “The offender first establishes trust through gifts, shared activities and special attention,” she said. “At a certain point, he asks the child to give him something in return, and those requests become sexual.”
The boy only broke his silence when he became an adult.
An Italian-language sign displayed on a corridor wall at the Meter Association’s headquarters reads: 'We do not have another life. We do not have another story.'Fabrizio Troccoli/The Globe and Mail
Don Fortunato is a friend – and a hero − to some survivors. Alessandra, 34, a teacher from northern Italy who did not want her full name used because her abuse case is now under preliminary investigation, said in a video interview that she was abused as a young girl by a Capuchin friar connected to the family’s prayer group. After the prayer sessions, he would take her aside and fondle her.
She never told anyone because she “was expected to be sweet, affectionate and well-behaved.”
She decided to break her silence two years ago, mostly because she feared the friar was still abusing children and felt she had a moral duty to stop him. She learned about Meter through Facebook and contacted Don Fortunato. “I felt completely welcomed by him,” Alessandra said. “I grew to experience him as a father figure. I felt a genuine emotional and spiritual closeness to him.”
The priest advised her to meet with the child protection service at the local Catholic diocese, as well as the senior Capuchin friars in the region. She learned that the friar who had abused her had left the church, whereabouts unknown. But all was not lost: She received an apology on behalf of the church from the local bishop, which helped in her healing process.
Don Fortunato was present during The Globe’s interview with Alessandra and told her, “Your story contains a striking paradox: You suffered because of a member of the clergy, while another member of the clergy helped you and continues to support you.”
To which Alessandra responded, “I believe Don Fortunato is a saint.”