The Spanish Church lags behind in investigations of sexual abuse

The president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference and Archbishop of Barcelona, ​​Juan José Omella, in Madrid in July 2020. Eduardo Parra / Europa Press (Europa Press via Getty Images)

Bishops in several countries have resigned due to the sexual abuse of minors in the Church. Others have assumed their responsibility and have recognized a "systemic" or "institutional" failure of the ecclesiastical leadership. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been disbursed in compensation for victims. And in some cases bishops' conferences have funded independent commissions to get to the bottom of the crimes and offenses committed in recent decades by priests and other religious personnel.

None of the actions cited in the preceding paragraph has occurred in Spain, one of the countries, along with Italy, with the greatest historical roots of Catholicism. They are decisions of the Catholic hierarchy in countries like the United States, Germany or France, often forced by lawsuits, journalistic revelations or pressure from the faithful and public opinion. Spain, like Italy, has lagged behind in a movement that, for two decades, has led the Church to face its sins and be held accountable.

EL PAÍS delivered a report to Pope Francis on December 2 with 251 cases of abuses investigated.

The president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), Cardinal Juan José Omella, also received the list.

This week a spokesman for the Spanish bishops distanced himself from the investigation by ensuring that the Vatican, specifically the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was dealing with it.

"The EEC," he argued, "has no jurisdiction to investigate."

No one, among several episcopal conferences consulted in other countries where ambitious and uncomfortable investigations for the hierarchy have been launched, wishes to assess the position of the Spanish bishops.

"The German Episcopal Conference does not pronounce on the Spanish Church," declares Mathias Koop, spokesman for the German Catholic bishops.

But the Spanish –or Italian– reaction to the scandals that began to come to light at the beginning of the millennium contrasts with that of countries such as the United States or Ireland, pioneers in this matter. And even with that of some ecclesiastical leaderships that for years minimized or ignored the problem in their countries and that have now decided to face it, such as France or Portugal.

"For too long, the reputation and honor of the Church took priority over listening, respecting and protecting the victims," ​​recalls Hugues de Woillemont, secretary general and spokesman for the Conference of Bishops of France (COF ).

In this country everything turned upside down in 2016, when the revelations about the abuses committed by a priest in Lyon unleashed an avalanche of complaints and were an electroshock for society.

The solution, adopted by the COF and the Conference of Men and Women Religious of France, consisted in convening an independent commission to be led by the senior official Jean-Marc Sauvé.

"The bishops understood that they could not investigate it themselves, because they would have been judge and party," explains Father De Woillemont.

"An outside look allowed to do this work."

Jean-Marc Sauve, president of the commission of inquiry in France, takes the copies of the report from the French episcopal conference, Eric de Moulins-Beaufort.

THOMAS COEX (AFP)

The

, published in October after more than two years of work, is devastating.

It concludes that there were a minimum of 216,000 victims between 1950 and 2020 of sexual assaults on minors perpetrated by between 2,900 and 3,200 priests and other ecclesiastical officials.

It is not a list of specific victims and aggressors but rather a statistical estimate;

hence the bulk of the figure in contrast to cases documented by commissions and investigations elsewhere.

In Portugal, the Episcopal Conference has adopted a path similar to the French one with the creation, announced in November, of an independent commission to investigate abuses. As in France, the commission will be financed by the Church and will be chaired by an external personality, the psychiatrist Pedro Strecht, who chose the remaining members: a former Minister of Justice, a sociologist from the University of Lisbon, a filmmaker, a family therapist and another psychiatrist. Work will begin in January.

The results of the

in France, or the Portuguese initiative, show the profound change in the Catholic Church since in 2002 the

newspaper

began to reveal the abuses in the diocese of Massachusetts, and the collusion of a hierarchy that moved from parish pedophile priests instead of removing them from the magisterium.

The then Pope John Paul II omitted the denunciations: the usual practice was to minimize the attacks.

Cardinal Bernard Law, archbishop of Boston at the time of the revelations and in previous years, resigned, but never testified in court despite being

defined by

the

as a "key figure" in the scandal.

Law died in Rome, protected by the Vatican.

According to data from the US Episcopal Conference, cited by the BishopAccountability, org portal, 7,002 religious have been accused "not implausibly" or "credibly" of sexual abuse in this country between the 1950s and 2018. The US bishops have counted 20,000 victims in the same period.

Very few of the accused have been convicted and even fewer imprisoned.

The American Church has chosen to close million-dollar agreements with the victims to avoid the courts, until paying more than 3,000 million dollars (almost 2,600 million euros) in compensation, which has bankrupted dozens of dioceses.

In Ireland, another of the countries where scandals first broke out and where almost 15,000 cases of abuse committed in the last 50 years were documented, it was not the Church that took the initiative and allowed the abuses to surface, but the State.

The compensation process for the victims was promoted by the Government itself and cost 1,500 million euros, five times more than the initial estimate and of which the Church only contributed 192 million.

The risk of bankruptcy in the face of a barrage of lawsuits or multi-million dollar reparations agreements may explain, in part, the reluctance of the Church in some countries to embark on investigations of the uncertain outcome.

"For us this is not a risk, but a willingness to go to the end," said Hugues de Woillemont, from the French Bishops' Conference, given the possibility that the French Church would have to pay costly compensation after assuming the responsibilities revealed in the

.

In November, a month after the publication of

, the plenary Assembly of French bishops, meeting in Lourdes, announced that it will use money from the sale of real estate to compensate the victims, among other measures to repair the victims.

"The Church will be impoverished," admits De Woillemont.

"We owe it to the victims."

As in Germany, where Cardinal Reinhard Marx has admitted that "he has looked the other way, he has hidden himself" and has recognized an "institutional failure", in France the French bishops have assumed "the institutional responsibility of the Church in the violence that so many victims have suffered ”and recognize“ the systemic dimension of this violence ”.

In Germany, the admission of responsibilities was the result of a report that the bishops commissioned three universities and that in 2018 documented 3,677 cases of abuse committed by 1,670 clergymen in the last seventy years.

Last June, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich, resigned to the Pope, who he rejected with the request that he work to "ventilate this reality of the abuses and how the Church proceeded."

The

cites the US, Germany and Ireland as background.

Also to Chile.

Cases of abuse by members of the Church exploded in this country in 2002.

"But Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz [who then presided over the Chilean episcopal conference], came to say that thank goodness that in Chile the cases were 'few', since he had information on many cases," says José Andrés Murillo, one of the the victims in the so-called

and today president of the Trust for Trust, which works to prevent abuse.

The total number of victims is still a mystery, but the complaints have hit several congregations, such as the Jesuit or the Marist.

The magnitude of what happened in a relatively small country and the behavior of the local Catholic Church hierarchy, made Chile an example in the world.

After Pope Francis' trip to Chile in 2018, where he defended a bishop accused of covering up, the Pontiff had to ask for forgiveness, began a cleaning of the Chilean church dome and received three of the victims with the greatest symbolism in the Vatican.

Since then, no major changes have been noticed in Chile, according to Murillo, who was invited by the Pope to hear his testimony.

"Everything has come to nothing at all," he says.

And it is true that much remains to be done and there is irreparable damage, but some countries have gone faster and others slower when it comes to investigating and being held accountable.

Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, explains this by a conjunction of factors.

One is the ease in the United States for the press to designate those accused of abuses: journalistic investigations, in effect, played a decisive role in forcing the Church to break the silence

"We have less stringent defamation and privacy laws," says Barrett Doyle.

“There is a more liberal press right.

Journalists are allowed to publish the names of priests who have been denounced ”.

Nicholas P. Cafardi, specialist in civil and canon law and dean emeritus and professor of law at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, stresses that countries where abuse cases first erupted, such as the United States and Ireland, are governed by

, the right of Anglo-Saxon tradition. The countries that have taken the longest, including France and Italy, follow the tradition of the Napoleonic civil code and Roman law.

Cafardi explains that the Anglo-Saxon system allows people aggrieved by the conduct or negligence of other people to easily go to court. And he adds: “Victims of pedophile priests could and did this in

countries . It was more difficult, if not impossible, in civil law countries, although in recent years it has started to change. "

To the legal framework, a cultural factor could be added between countries with a tradition of transparency and Latin countries with an inclination to wash dirty laundry at home. The journey, however, has been common in the majority: from denial or relativization to the assumption of responsibilities and the adoption of forceful measures. The limit of these initiatives is the prescription of crimes and crimes that in many cases happened decades ago and in which the aggressors have sometimes died.

In October, when the report of the Sauvé commission was presented, the president of the Conference of Religious of France, Véronique Margron, declared to EL PAÍS: “I can only deplore that great countries of a great Catholic tradition such as Spain or Italy have not started this work. I dare to think that the work [of the commission] might inspire other churches to talk about this. "

The fear in some sectors of the Church is that washing dirty clothes in public will further weaken an institution already eroded in Europe by the loss of faithful and vocations.

Asked whether the French Church comes out stronger or weaker from the recent investigation into the abuses, De Woillemont, secretary general of the French Bishops' Conference, responds: “I think he comes out more humble and having started to seriously do the work of light and truth ”.

With information from:

(Lisbon),

(London),

(Berlin),

(Mexico),

(New York) and

(Paris).