EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish church in 2018 and has an updated database of all known cases. If you know of a case that has not yet come to light, you can write to us at: [email protected]. If it concerns a case in Latin America, the address is: [email protected].
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“We were always alone, each with our own secret. I had never met any of them and wanted to talk to them, get to know them, know who they were and what their lives had been like.” From the day Leonor García appeared in this newspaper in December 2021 and reported on the abuse , which she suffered in her childhood at the hands of a priest, she began to meet other people who felt the same way. It happened to her in the seventies in the Santa Marina sanatorium in Bilbao with the priest Martín Valle García, a name that she finally discovered this year, only thanks to the direct intervention of the Biscayan bishop. His case is one of the 251 cases included in the first report that EL PAÍS then sent to the Pope and the President of the Episcopal Conference (CEE), Juan José Omella. On a television where several victims were being interviewed, Leonor met Emiliano Álvarez, one of the first to appear in the media. He seemed like such a special guy that he wanted to talk to him further and visit him in León. He took his Renault Clio and converted it so that he could sleep in it with his dog Tinta. His brother had an idea: record it on video. She is a journalist and author and it was the beginning of a documentary that took her through half of Spain in conversation with other victims, 20,000 kilometers of confession, which she signs as Leonor Paqué.
Emiliano died in August 2022, still awaiting justice and unable to see the end of the congressionally mandated investigation that gave him hope. “I think of Emiliano, how I would have liked to hug him today,” Leonor said on Friday after learning of the Ombudsman’s report. For many of the first victims to come to light, the realization of the truth came too late, although this was met with social rejection. Emiliano Álvarez was the first victim of pedophilia in the church to agree to appear on camera for this newspaper in September 2018. The priest Ángel Sánchez Cao had abused him between 1976 and 1978 in the minor seminary of San José de La Bañeza in Lion. For him, it was “the layer of fear” that he had to carry throughout his life that led to heroin. “All the drugs were too little to alleviate the damage they had done to me,” he repeated.
When he spoke to EL PAÍS, he had already filed a complaint with the diocese of Astorga. The canonical punishment was five years, and he was right. The bishop did not deign to summon him, he informed him of the verdict via WhatsApp. The news also reached Lucas, the fictitious name of another victim of the same priest in the same seminary, who does not want to reveal his name and has never appeared in the press before. If Emiliano represents the victims who came to light, he is the other hidden side, which in reality represents the vast majority. Now it appears in Leonor’s documentation.
Interview with Emiliano Álvarez, alleged victim of sexual abuse from La Bañeza.
Lucas was abused between 1979 and 1980, he spent his life with this trauma and one day, in 2015, he suddenly met his attacker by chance, who was still in a parish and working with children. “There it was, it was like seeing the wolf in the mountains, it made your hair stand on end, and everything came to mind.” He found the Stolen Childhood organization and reported it to the church. But he always preferred to avoid the press. Appearing in public and reporting their pain in a newspaper was another sacrifice victims were forced to make as a last resort. “With Leonor there was a different empathy, it was easier for me to talk, she went through that,” he explains.
“I told you the before and after, the treatment we received with absolute contempt from the majority of society. How are you going to act against a priest?” Lucas and Emiliano saw how the priest who abused them even filed a complaint and some of the parishioners collected signatures in defense of the attacker. “Emiliano suffered a lot, when he appeared in the press they took action against him to discredit him. We have once again been victimized by society. They tell you, “I was there and they didn’t hurt me.” Of course, just because it didn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to me. Lucas tells how abuse “changes your behavior, I was a very happy person, it makes you suspicious, even more angry.” He believes the Ombudsman’s report represents “another step forward”: “At least now people know what evil there is, what freedom these evildoers had.” “I don’t know if anything will change, but more people will understand, new victims who have kept it quiet will come to light.”
Like him, hundreds of sufferers have told EL PAÍS over the years not only about their abuse, but also about how they lose their jobs, how there is no money to pay for therapy, how their relationships with others and with their partners become difficult. Leonor’s documentary wants to tell this story and collects twelve and her own statements from four women and eight men in four chapters. It is in the editing phase and is looking for a platform or a production company that is interested in participating in the project. She financed it herself, although one of the victims, one of the few who received compensation, gave her a Bizum when she found out she was sleeping in the car so she could go to a hotel that night. “There are victims who remain very alone. One sleeps in bed with a baseball bat because she still feels threatened. One more thing: I can’t sleep without light. It’s as if we were damaged materially, emotionally, sexually and socially,” says Leonor.
The victims of church abuse in their childhood were previously a hidden group, they didn’t even know how many there were. One of the first to appear on television was Javier Paz, who denounced abuse by a priest in Salamanca in an interview on La Sexta in 2014. “The next day I received hundreds of messages on Facebook from other victims telling me about their case.” “They didn’t know what to do or where to go and when they saw me they wrote to me as if I was telling them could help,” he remembers. Since then, an underground support network of WhatsApp groups has been built, and the first window to come to light was the complaint email that EL PAÍS opened in 2018 and to which hundreds of people wrote. For Javier Paz, the Ombudsman’s report represents a milestone: “After almost 13 years since I started talking to the Church, after the inaction of the Diocese of Salamanca and the feeling of being devastated by the damage they are doing “I later denounced it publicly.” Today it means not reaching the end of the road, but a part of it, a goal that I dreamed of years ago. Ángel Gabilondo strongly and clearly defended the victims’ need for justice, recognition and support measures. A door has been opened, let’s hope times are not too slow now, we need an answer now.”
José Antonio Pérez still remembers the impact in Bilbao when his story was published in this newspaper in 2019. He was the first victim to accuse Don Chemi, a former Salesian of the Deusto School, of abusing him in the 1980s. Her story encouraged dozens of other victims to come forward. Within two weeks, the Ertzaintza received around thirty complaints. In response to the scandal, Bilbao city council released a statement of support and there was a neighborhood demonstration in front of the school. The Salesians, who had claimed ignorance of the facts for days, finally admitted that they had covered up the religious for decades. The abuse case among the Salesians of Deusto was the first to generate a large civic and political response, which also helped other victims of the Salesian schools to make their cases known. In any case, everything had ended and the defendant, who continued to organize activities with minors, continued his life in Bilbao without any problems.
Neighborhood demonstration in front of the Deusto Salesian School in Bilbao in February 2019, after EL PAÍS exposed the abuse of minors in this center. FENANDO DOMINGO-ALDAMA
In the final part of the documentation, the Ombudsman’s report arrived. “Our intuition was true: in a country with our history of national Catholicism, it was much worse than in France and other countries. Personally, I think of my mother. If she had seen that, perhaps she could have left in peace and stopped crying and feeling guilty about the attacks she failed to protect us from. We managed to recognize a universal shame on the part of the Church, that it was a shame to look the other way, that we were children. Will something happen? Does reporting mean we are no longer under suspicion if we don’t know exactly what? Will this society, the politicians, act? Will the church pay a price, will it face its responsibilities? They are all questions. And the desire to cry and hug fellow fighters. The report is a starting point for everything that needs to happen: recognizing the victims, caring for them and respecting them. I hope that the little girl inside me, attacked and scared, can rest in peace with all that has been taken from me.”
Leonor, victim of church abuse, next to her car converted into a caravan.Samuel Sánchez
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