The Spanish Church denies that there are more than 230,000 victims of ecclesiastical pederasty

2023-10-31 00:09:56

BarcelonaThe Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) has criticized the extrapolation of victims of pederasty in the Church that public opinion made from the investigation presented on Friday by the Ombudsman, Ángel Gabilondo, and has recalled that the State has to assume their responsibilities because the problem is mostly “extra-ecclesial”. In this sense, the EEC has opened up to participate in the comprehensive reparation of the victims that the Ombudsman demanded last week. The 88 bishops gathered in plenary assembly in Madrid have remarked that focusing “exclusively on the reparation of the victims of the Church” would be a way of discriminating against “the majority of victims” because it would turn them into “second-class victims”.

The Ombudsman detailed on Friday that 0.6% of citizens who took part in a survey of more than 8,000 people admitted to having suffered sexual abuse by priests or religious. A percentage that represented more than 230,000 victims throughout Spain if the adult Spanish population was taken into account. The fact that public opinion made this estimate did not please the Spanish bishops. “The abuses committed in the Church hurt. The extrapolation of the data obtained in the survey is also surprising. They do not correspond to the truth and do not represent the group of priests and religious who work loyally,” they say in the statement the bishops of the EEC, made public this Monday night.

The Spanish Church, led by the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Joan Josep Omella, has once again apologized to the victims and regretted the “pain” caused by some of its members. In addition, he assured that many of the recommendations that Gabilondo made – and which they consider as “valuable” – have already been working within the EEC itself for some time and that they should allow “to work together on the comprehensive repair of the victims and deepen the paths for their protection, accompaniment and the prevention of abuse”.

“The Ombudsman’s study presents an overview of the problem that goes beyond the Church: sexual abuse of minors is a social problem to which all public and private institutions have the duty to respond,” says the text In the document made public by the EEC, emphasis is placed on the need for the State to address this problem that goes beyond the Church because not doing so would mean not “addressing the causes of the problem and perpetuating it over time”.

Among the recommendations that Gabilondo proposed was the creation of a state fund to reward victims of sexual abuse and the creation of a special body whose purpose is to reparate victims who have not found an answer in the way penalty In addition, the Ombudsman advocated for the implementation of a law that modifies the statute of limitations for civil liability actions arising from crimes of assault and sexual abuse of minors, with the aim of allowing compensation to be agreed for cases prior to its entry into force.

The Spanish bishops have postponed until the November assembly the decision on the request of Javier Cremades, president of the firm Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo, who requested to extend the time to carry out the audit on pederasty within the ‘Church that was commissioned from the EEC in February 2022.