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The Me Too of pedophilia in the Church: testimonies of public figures begin to emerge

2022-02-12T04:59:35.647Z


More and more people take the step motivated by the story of other victims. “This wave of cases has pushed me. I would never have dared”, says the journalist José Antonio Martínez Soler


The journalist José Antonio Martínez Soler, victim of abuse when he was a minor in Alicante, this Friday at his home in Villanueva de la Cañada (Madrid). Olmo Calvo

Many of the victims of pederasty in the Church had no way of knowing if what they suffered as children were specific episodes or part of a pattern repeated in schools and parishes in Spain.

Sharing such painful moments is very difficult.

They have understood that the second scenario was, that it did not happen only in their school, when many of these victims have told their stories, such as the 251 that EL PAÍS has compiled in recent years and that have motivated the Vatican to open an investigation.

These stories push other people in the same situation, a wave that has gained strength in recent weeks and is reminiscent of Me Too

,

the feminist cry that broke the silence around aggression, abuse and sexual harassment in 2017. women committed by men in positions of power.

“I was eight or nine years old [in 1955 or 1956] and had only been in school for a short time.

I trusted him”, he told this week in

La Voz de Almería

the journalist José Antonio Martínez Soler, about what happened to him at the La Salle school in Almería.

The priest who abused him was Brother José.

“With me he was nice and generous.

He gave me candy and good behavior tokens to improve my grades or ease punishments.

In a moment, he went from caressing my neck and face to my thighs.

I was wearing shorts.

I flushed with shame and helplessness.

I was paralyzed.

He reeked of dried sweat.

His breathing quickened.

I couldn't or didn't know how to react until he hugged me and tried to stroke my dick.

I mean, jerk me off.

He reached out to touch it.

Stunned, I jumped from his knees, nearly rolling on the floor, and ran out of that office/dungeon in shock.”

Pederasty in the Church has become one of the main subjects of political conversation in Spain in recent weeks, which is helping many people, like Martínez Soler, share the story of the abuse they suffered.

A good part of this impulse is due to the investigation opened by the Holy See based on the EL PAÍS dossier.

Since then, the public powers have begun to move: the State Attorney General's Office has asked the regional prosecutor's offices to collect all cases of abuse in the Church and the Government is looking for the formula to organize an independent investigation.

The President of the Executive is committed to the Ombudsman leading the initiative.

Martínez Soler explains by phone to EL PAÍS that the uproar surrounding abuses in the Church in recent weeks has encouraged him to tell his experience publicly for the first time.

“This wave of cases has pushed me.

If it wasn't for the first ones, who have told it so bravely, I would never have dared.

I am more of a coward, but I feel an atmosphere of hope, a determination that abusers be persecuted and that this never be repeated, ”he explains, at 75 years old.

One of the cases that has most impressed him and that has helped him publicly recount what happened to him is that of the writer Alejandro Palomas, also a student at another La Salle school: “From February 1975 until Christmas 1976, I suffered abuse by brother L.”, he recounted last week.

More information

The writer Alejandro Palomas denounces that he suffered abuse from a religious: "I am a diminished uncle, at eight years old I became a survivor"

A spokeswoman for La Salle explains that, since the journalist has preferred not to file a complaint, they have launched an internal investigation based on what Martínez Soler has told.

Asked about the possibility of this investigation contacting other contemporary former students to find out if they suffered the same, the spokeswoman explains that the institution "adheres" to what the journalist told and that they "open the doors" for other People give their testimony.

La Salle accumulates a total of 26 defendants and at least 60 victims in 27 of the 115 schools that the order has in Spain, according to the accounts of this newspaper, the only one in Spain in the absence of official or Church data.

Martínez Soler is a journalistic reference in Spain: he founded

20 minutes

and was editor-in-chief of EL PAÍS and

Cambio16

.

His investigations into the leadership of the Civil Guard in the magazine

El Doblón

, during the Transition, cost him a kidnapping in 1976. “My wife is from Boston (United States) and she is a journalist, so she knew first-hand the investigation of

The Boston Globe

”.

This media outlet uncovered the network of abuses in the US Catholic Church, an investigation that was illustrated in the 2015 film

Spotlight

.

“He always told me that I had to tell what I suffered, that if it was happening in the United States or Ireland, it would surely happen in Spain as well.

He was right".

Almería, the province in which Martínez Soler suffered abuse, is one of the only three in which the EL PAÍS dossier does not include cases.

“Well, there were, and many.

By sharing this story on Facebook, several classmates from my course have responded with their experiences in the first person.

Others say they know people traumatized by these behaviors.”

“The problem”, continues the journalist, “is that we have been under a national Catholic regime for 40 years in which the Church was a pillar.

If you denounced the church, your parents could lose their jobs, if something worse did not happen to them.

Fear lived among us, not only because of the abuse.

A total

omertá

was imposed ”, adds Martínez Soler.

That climate is the same that Juan Clavero alludes to, an environmental activist well known in Cádiz for his role in Ecologists in Action.

On January 29, he told

Diario de Cádiz

the episodes of abuse he experienced in the 1970s at his Jesuit educational center in Seville, the Colegio Inmaculado Corazón de María, Portaceli: “The worst thing was the impunity with which some Jesuits sexually abused their students.

I did not suffer them, they chose their victims among children with weak character and affective problems, in need of parental protection.

I did suffer the confessions of some perverted priest.

We all knew what was going on,” he writes.

He was expelled from the center for denouncing the abusive priests.

“Less than a month ago”, he explains to EL PAÍS, “I accessed my school file.

I was amazed: it doesn't say anything about being expelled, only that I dropped out.

My father, who was a fervent Catholic, believed the priests and practically disowned me."

On the other side of Spain, in Santiago de Compostela, the journalist Gonzalo Cortizo studied.

“I heard in the SER that they were talking about a certain JB [also included in the dossier of this newspaper] who had abused several students at the La Salle school in Santiago.

I knew immediately who he was.

He had given me a class”, he explains in a telephone conversation.

This Tuesday he published in

elDiario.es

a text in the first person in which he identifies the alleged abuser, with whom he coincided in the eighties: “I recognize him instantly.

Joaquín Berruguete, the Berruguete brother: head of studies, Physics and Chemistry teacher, fond of touching students under their clothes and a violent character who could make you bleed with a punch if you did not understand a crazy code, which almost none we understood

What that priest did always began as a joke and ended badly.

We had no culture about abuse but we were not assholes either.

That was part of a system and this is perhaps the most important aspect of all: they were not isolated events, other teachers did similar things.

I, unless my memory betrayed me to take care of myself, was one of those who was saved.

The new impetus for the debate on abuses is helping to bring out more and more complaints [which this newspaper continues to receive by email at abuses@elpais.es].

However, many other people have helped to make pedophilia visible in the Church by sharing their dark stories from the past.

For example, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa revealed it in his work

From him The fish in the water (

first edition in Planeta, 1993) and detailed it in an interview in September 2021: "I completely distanced myself from religion, but the kids in my neighborhood never recovered."

Film director Pedro Almodóvar recounted in another interview in 2019 that a priest had tried to abuse him: “I remember at least 20 boarding children who were harassed.

They also tried me, but I always managed to escape.

There was a priest who always put my hand out in the courtyard for me to kiss.

I never did it.

He always ran away.

We were very scared".

The artist and television collaborator Enrique del Pozo suffered abuse when he was 11 years old: "Remembering it produces a kind of knot in my stomach."

All these testimonies are from men, but women also suffer from pederasty in the church: they represent 14.6% of the victims of the dossier that EL PAÍS has delivered to the Vatican.

If you know of any case of sexual abuse that has not seen the light of day, write to us with your complaint at

abuse@elpais.es

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Source: elparis

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