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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Spain is an exception for Pope Francis. Despite his critical statements about the handling of the pedophile scandal in the Church when publishing studies and information in countries such as the USA, France, Portugal and Italy, the Pope has remained silent on the situation in Spain for five years. Most of the cases began to come to light with this newspaper’s investigations. A month has passed since the Ombudsman presented his report on abuse in the church – which estimated that 1.13% of the adult Spanish population was abused in religious institutions during their childhood, equivalent to 440,000 people – and Francis has not Word said Although the issue has already taken on a political tone, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced in his investiture speech that he would call on the Church to compensate the victims and assume their responsibilities. The Pope also avoided the topic last week, according to the Spanish bishops, in the unusual appeal to the entire Spanish episcopate that he made after the publication of the Ombudsman’s report, and in two hours they only debated the situation of the seminaries, which the Case was officially the only topic to discuss.
In fact, despite the expectations raised, it was no surprise for the Vatican that it limited the meeting with the Spanish Bishops’ Conference (CEE) to a topic as marginal as the restructuring of seminaries. A few days ago he himself had told certain people about it. I didn’t want to bring up the topic of abuse. Nobody else is far away from the question of training centers. The visit was part of support for Cardinal Juan José Omella, Archbishop of Barcelona and President of the CEE, in the implementation of his plan to restructure the seminaries. But beyond what was expected, it disappointed many responsible for the fight against this scourge, who considered that a meeting with 80 Spanish bishops, at a time when figures never previously approved by the Church were known in Spain, was a missed opportunity could be viewed. This newspaper twice asked the Holy See Press Office for an assessment of the report, without success.
The statement from Vatican sources is that the Pope fully supports Omella, his confidante in Spain and the type of cardinal Francis wants for his church (more parish and street than palace). And that the position taken by the Cardinal and Archbishop of Barcelona on this question is the same as that taken by the Pope. “This is the version they told the pope and he trusts them,” Vatican sources say. Furthermore, addressing the issue of abuses and insulting the bishops would have meant weakening Omella at a crucial moment for the EEC and just before the election of a new president, they point out.
The Holy See’s only statement on the outbreak of cases in Spain came in December 2021, after EL PAÍS presented its first report to both the Pope and the President of the Spanish Bishops, with victim statements against 251 clergy and laypeople. While the EEC withdrew and refused to investigate, the Vatican immediately expressed the Pope’s “attention” and “closeness” to the victims of pedophilia “with words, prayers and with so many gestures.” But then this initial divergence was overcome because the Spanish Church completely corrected its position of total denial of the problem. For example, two months later, the EEC commissioned an external audit of a law firm that will close this month. And she just announced that she is ready to compensate all victims.
The internal opinion on the issue of abuse is that there has been some relaxation recently against the background of major international crises in which the Vatican has tried to play a relevant role. Especially given the treatment, including by the Pope, in certain cases such as that of Father Marko Ivan Rupnik, a 68-year-old Slovenian Jesuit priest who was accused of abusing several nuns and protected for a long time until media pressure forced the reopening of an investigation . Or even some of the reforms carried out in the Dicastery of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which do not provide the agility in case management that Francis proposed in his reorganization in February 2022 and which are probably due to the lack of human resources.
The injured also include the victims. Javier is one of them. In 2014, he wrote to Francisco asking for help: he had been abused in the León seminary in La Bañeza, and although he had asked for help at the time, both the director of the center and the bishop covered up the matter. The Pope ordered the case to be reopened canonically, but Javier found no justice: the trial was full of irregularities, he received no compensation and the confessed pedophile did not serve his sentence. He has since denounced the Spanish bishops’ cover-up of abuses and their poor handling of the problem. The Pope’s silence in the face of official data from a public institution such as the Ombudsman is disappointing. “Victims are very angry that the pedophile leader has not addressed the issue of abuse. “You shouldn’t worry too much about it,” he says.
Miguel Hurtado, activist and victim who exposed the pedophile scandal in the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat (Barcelona), finds the Pope’s passivity not “surprising but disappointing” in the face of the Spanish Church’s serious credibility crisis. “The Vatican, like a broken record, reiterates the importance of the protocols, but in practice refuses to monitor that they are correctly applied at the local level to improve the lives of victims. Like John Paul II and Benedict XVI. [Francisco] He only reacts when the problem explodes in front of him and takes the minimum necessary measures,” says Hurtado.
Juan Cuatrecasas, president of the National Stolen Childhood Association (ANIR), is convinced that the Spanish prelates have spoken to the Pope about the issue. “But they don’t want it to be known, for whatever reason,” he argues. Cuatrecasas is the father of the victim of the Gaztelueta case, an Opus Dei school in Vizcaya. Although the Supreme Court convicted the pedophile professor in 2020, the Spanish Church canonically ruled that he was innocent. In response, the pope agreed with the victim and ordered the trial to be reopened last year. “On a personal level, my experiences with the Pope have been very positive. I never spoke badly about him. He intervened directly in our case so that it was truly investigated,” says the president of ANIR.
The Pope remains silent on Spain, but has personally intervened in some specific cases. Gazteluetas is not the only one. He also did this in the so-called Romano case. The victim wrote to the pope in 2014 to tell him about the alleged abuse she suffered in Granada, and he called her and asked her for forgiveness. The news caused a media earthquake: the person concerned filed a lawsuit in court and a canonical case was opened involving 13 clergy and two lay people who were separated. Most of the crimes were time-barred, but not that of the main defendant, the priest Román Martínez. But the judiciary declared him innocent in 2018. The Pope asked the priest for forgiveness and received him in the Vatican.
Pope Francis’ policies against child abuse represented a sea change throughout the Catholic Church. The passage of new and forceful laws – such as the important Vos estis lux mundi, which mandated the investigation of all reported cases – was accompanied by unprecedented disciplinary and punitive measures. Bergoglio even disowned Theodore McCarrick, an American cardinal, due to an abuse scandal involving Francis himself. He liquidated the entire leadership of the Chilean Episcopal Conference, convened a major summit on the issue in Rome in 2019 and created a Pontifical Commission for the Guardianship of Minors. The revolution was underway. Francis understood for the first time in January 2018, during his trip to Chile, that the matter represented an extremely serious problem for the Church, which was already deeply affected when he landed in the chair of Saint Peter: for its image and for its survival. He also always gave the impression that there were places where the problem worried him more than others.
For example, in 2018, when the results of the investigation by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office in the US involving a major actor were announced, Francisco wrote a public letter asking for forgiveness from the victims. “It is with shame and regret that we as an ecclesial community accept that we did not know how to be where we were supposed to be, that we did not act in a timely manner, even though we recognized the extent and severity of the damage that was so “was inflicted on many.” lives,” the document says.
In October 2021, after the figures from the French report on church pedophilia emerged, Francis condemned the church’s ongoing inability to deal with sexual assaults by pedophile priests. “It is the moment of shame,” he said in one of his weekly hearings. He did the same with the Portuguese study, emphasizing that “it is time to purify.” He even met 13 Portuguese victims during his visit to the Portuguese countryside this summer.
The latest statements came last week when the Italian Bishops’ Conference released the results of its own report, in which Francis highlighted the importance of clarifying the truth and restoring justice within the ecclesial community. He was forceful: “Neither silence nor concealment can be accepted about abuse. This is non-negotiable.” But in view of the constant information about the abuse scandal in the Spanish church for five years, Francisco remains silent.
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