The direction of the discourse of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) on its management of pederasty cases has undergone a shift in recent weeks: from denial to recognizing that the Church has been late in dealing with the problem.
“It is wise to rectify”, responded this Thursday the president of the CEE, Cardinal Juan José Omella, before the questions of this newspaper after his interview in Rome with the Pope.
Omella admits that recent journalistic publications have helped this change of position in the leadership of the Church so that, two months ago, it commissioned a law firm to carry out an audit to learn about past cases, investigate the cover-up and compensate the victims. .
Words that clash with those pronounced just three years ago, in April 2019, by the Secretary of the Conference, Bishop Luis Argüello:
“We will not make a report.
We will investigate the cases that they communicate to us, but we will not go with a magnifying glass.
There is no data.
What do we do?
Take a time tunnel?
Along with the publications of numerous cases in the press, the dossier delivered to the Pope in December 2021 and social pressure, an ecclesiastical official affirms that a change within the EEC is also added to this 180-degree turn.
“There is a third of the Spanish bishops, mostly the youngest, that without them we would not be talking about Cremades [office to which the Conference has commissioned the audit].
They have done and are doing a lot of pressure for the Church to change the direction of how to act in the face of abuse and its past.
It was a situation that cried out to heaven”, emphasizes this source.
Despite the change in position, a lack of transparency continues to be perceived on several points on this issue in which, over the last three years and through its declarations, the EEC has contradicted itself.
Spain is an exception
One of the explanations that the EEC has given when asked why it did not set up an independent investigation commission as the German or French Church has done in recent years (where hundreds of cases came to light) is that Spain could be an exception.
“Perhaps in Spanish society, due to the same way priests live in parish life, due to their relationship with the people, due to the style of the seminaries, the number of ecclesiastical abusers has been lower,” Argüello argued. February 25, 2021, during a press conference after the first plenary session of the year.
Just one year later, in February 2022, the spokesman for the bishops recognized for the first time in an interview on
Ràdio Estel
, the station of the Archbishopric of Barcelona, that if the Spanish Church launched an independent investigation of the past like the one they did the French prelates (whose results estimate the number of victims in the last 70 years at around 330,000) would lead him “to somewhat similar conclusions”.
“They are only small cases”
Despite the constant questions from the media about the number of cases that the Church knows and has managed in its courts, the church hierarchy has always responded with evasiveness or providing vague data, without clarifying the date and place.
Even until 2020, according to what a spokesperson informed this newspaper, the Conference did not count the victims that appeared in the press, a dynamic that has also changed in recent months, when Omella officially met with associations of those affected.
On February 25, 2021, the also spokesman for the bishops reported at a press conference that the number of complaints they had received to date in their victim assistance offices (open since 2019 by order of the Pope in each episcopate) had been “very small”.
The day before, EL PAÍS published a report after asking each of the 70 dioceses the number of cases they had recorded in recent decades.
Of these, 32 agreed to inform, although the majority did not count any.
Only 15 bishoprics admitted 45. A number that did not match the one Argüello gave.
In April of that same year, the EEC provided data on pederasty in Spain for the first time: it did not ask the dioceses, but rather the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where the bishops must report the cases they know of since 2002.
In the last 20 years, Rome had received 220 complaints from priests, 144 of them dependent on the bishoprics (this count did not include religious who are not priests).
Two readings could be interpreted from this publication.
Either the 38 dioceses that did not share their data with EL PAÍS two months earlier (many of them the smallest in size) had received 99 cases (144 of those received from Rome minus the 45 admitted to this newspaper) or many of the bishops had lied.
Despite this, Argüello continued to insist on November 19, 2021 that the complaints that had reached the offices since 2019 "are only small cases."
Four months later, and once the dossier prepared by EL PAÍS with 251 unpublished cases and the announcement by the EEC to investigate itself has been published, the bishops and religious orders make public new data from their offices: 502 cases, 177 belonging to the bishoprics, according to the data that the CEE presented on March 31 to the delegates of these offices.
The figures went from “zero cases or none” to half a thousand in three months.
Argüello did not explain the figures, simply reporting that certain cases were possibly duplicates, although he did not say which ones.
The general secretary of the CEE, Luis Argüello (d), and the president of the office that audits abuses, Javier Cremades (c), during the meeting of the offices for the protection of minors and the prevention of abuses of the dioceses and religious congregations last week in Madrid. Javier Lizón (EFE)
“We have no power”
The main justification for the CEE for not setting up an independent commission to investigate past cases was its lack of authority over the dioceses, as it was a collegiate organization.
“Let each diocese do what it sees fit,” the then president of the Conference, Cardinal Ricardo Blázquez, said in 2018.
Since then, that has been the pretext for not investigating herself in a general way.
Until February 2022, when the Executive Commission commissioned the firm Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo to carry out an audit on the problem.
Not only was an agreement signed without the vote in favor of all the Spanish bishops, but some of the Executive itself, such as the vice president of the EEC, Cardinal Carlos Osoro, was not aware of it until after Omella contributed his signature .
"The Conference has paid zero euros of compensation"
Compensation to victims continues to be one of the issues on which the Church in general and the bishops in particular have shown less transparency: they have not reported how much they have paid, even, in some cases, how they will do it in the future.
Fernando Giménez Barriocanal, chief of finances of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, said in an interview with this newspaper on November 10, 2018 that the EEC had allocated, until then, "zero euros to the Spanish dioceses" to compensate those affected by abuses.
"Outside of that, the item that may exist should be scarcely significant in the set of all those of the Church," explained Barriocanal despite stating that he does not know how much money the bishops have paid to the victims.
The EEC has the power to demand directly from each bishop that he specify how much he has spent on compensating victims of abuse: “Many dioceses continue to present their balance sheets with a section called 'other expenses' where they do not account for what that percentage has been spent on of money.
That is not accepted by the Treasury”, says this specialist.
This newspaper has put at least 2,063,728 euros the amount that the Church (diocese and religious orders) has paid to 173 victims in the last four decades, according to what appears in court rulings and in the press, in this last case on the episodes in which several bishops or congregations bought the silence of those affected.
After the announcement of the audit, the president of the CEE and the CEO of the firm, Javier Cremades, insisted during the presentation of the same last February that the reparation of those affected would be one of the three pillars of the initiative.
An anticlerical campaign
The role of the press has been another point that has changed course in the discourse of the Spanish Church.
When in October 2018 EL PAÍS published its first report reporting how the Church had silenced for decades the cases it heard about, many were the prelates who publicly branded the reasons for these reports as anticlerical.
“They want to unfairly spread a veil of suspicion over the immense crowd of priests,” said the Bishop of Ávila, former CEE Secretary José María Gil Tamayo, during his first homily as a cardinal on December 15, 2018.
This dynamic continued even when this newspaper delivered its dossier, which in a press release in December 2021 the EEC called "not very rigorous".
In fact, a day and a half after going public,
that would be carried out only by the Vatican.
Shortly after, several bishops, such as Bilbao and Santiago de Compostela, spoke in favor of the work of this newspaper.
Others followed, as did many religious orders.
Cardinal Osoro admitted last month that without this journalistic work "the situation [of the abuses], possibly, would not have changed."
During his trip to Rome this week, Omella thanked EL PAÍS for their work and attributed the reactions of the prelates to a matter of character: “Sometimes, we are all a little impulsive and jump.
But that's it."
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