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Abuses in Spanish parishes: "While the priest touched me, the sacristan pounded on the door to get him to release me"

2022-08-18T04:12:19.811Z


“Untouchables and their word, unappealable”. This is how most of the victims of pederasty who denounce parish priests describe their aggressors. For many survivors, the high position of these priests in the community was a major obstacle in telling what happened.


Jose Maria Viar poses in front of the Bilbao church of San Francisco de Asis, where he assures that he suffered abuse by the priest Vicente Gorocica in the sixties.Fernando Domingo-Aldama

María Díaz de Jesús has kept a secret for seven decades.

A story that until recently she thought she would take with her to the grave.

Now, at 80 years old, she has decided to tell it.

When she was eight, a simple errand turned into an ordeal she would carry for the rest of her life.

“I can't forget it,” she explains.

In 1949, she lived with her family in the Biscayan town of Erandio, in a house opposite the parish church of San Agustín.

One day, her mother sent her to that church, where the curate José Luis Pujana would give her a paper so that her brother could enroll in a friar's school.

“In the sacristy, the priest sat on a chair, took me between his legs and began to ask me if my stomach hurt.

Meanwhile, I would put my hand inside my panties, ”she recounts.

Fear, she adds, invaded her body for several months.

Pujana is one of the 100 priests accused of abusing minors while exercising their religious ministry within a parish, according to this newspaper's database on cases of pederasty in the Church, which already registers 840 abusers and 1,594 victims.

In this type of case – where the aggressor is a parish priest or assistant in these temples – women represent three out of 10 of the complainants.

In the general ledger, women represent approximately 17.5%.

The story of Díaz de Jesús is also part of the 451 cases that this newspaper has delivered to the Vatican and the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) in two reports in 2021 and 2022.

More information

The Spanish Church investigates a second report on pederasty with 278 new testimonies

Díaz de Jesús says that the abuse he suffered led to sequels that he has carried throughout his life.

“When I started with my boyfriend, who is now my husband, I had problems.

He wouldn't let me touch.

I told him about it and he was patient, but even when we were married I didn't want preliminaries, or touching, or anything, ”he says.

The memory of what happened 20 years ago led him to track down the name of the accused on the internet.

“I put his name and I got an article from a woman talking about him, telling his story.

He was telling just the same story as me with the same priest.

Apparently, from Erandio he went to San Ignacio, another neighborhood in Bilbao”, he relates.

The website Díaz is talking about is called

Noizbehinkakoak

.

The author, who prefers to remain anonymous, published a letter in 2012 with the title

Today is our anniversary, pig,

in which she recounted how Pujana abused her between 1985 and 1989 in the Church of San Ignacio and on excursions organized by the priest.

What he writes happened more than three decades after the events described by Díaz de Jesús.

“It horrifies me to think that this subject was already acting in the year 49, when he would have been about 35 years old.

What a barbarity ”, he affirms after knowing the story

of Diaz de Jesus.

The Bilbao diocese affirms that it has opened an investigation into these events and has made itself available to Díaz de Jesús and other possible victims.

This bishopric also faces another complaint against another coadjutor, the priest Vicente Gorocica y Lequerica.

José María Viar, 72, recounts that at the age of 10 he used to visit the Bilbao parish of San Francisco de Asís, popularly known as the Fifth Parish, on a weekly basis.

One day, he describes it, Gorocica took him to his office.

He “he locked the door.

He had a big office, with that old furniture.

He sat down in an armchair and sat me on top of his right knee.

He began to talk to me about the confession and he began to put his hand inside my pants, in my parts, ”Viar describes.

Minutes later, adds the victim, someone knocked on the door, but Gorocica did not open.

“While the priest touched me, the sacristan pounded on the door to get him to release me.

He didn't stop.

After a while, he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me out of there.

The priest Vicente Gorocica, accused of abusing a minor in a Bilbao parish in the sixties.

Viar did not return to the parish until decades later, when he worked as an electrician and his company was commissioned to wire the temple.

“While I was working, I heard some parishioners from the Brotherhood of the Nazarene – a brotherhood of which the accused was spiritual director – that they were going to pay homage to him and I told them that this man was a pederast.

That, if they did a tribute to him, he would tell the press.

I don't know what happened next,” he explains.

He did not speak of his case again until 2022, when he read other episodes of abuse in the press.

“I decided to tell it and wrote to EL PAÍS.

Recently, I have been with the bishopric commission of Bilbao and I have filed a complaint with the Ertzaintza, although I know that the crime is prescribed, ”he says.

The Bilbao diocese has informed this newspaper that it is continuing to investigate the case.

"He told me that ours was a love relationship"

They gave mass and catechism.

They absolved sins in the confessional.

They shared misfortunes and joys with the parishioners.

They were invited to parties, and attended baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

But they were untouchable.

And his word, unappealable.

This is how the majority of victims of parish priests describe their aggressors.

This position that they had in the community made it impossible for the survivors of their abuse to report the damage that this person was causing them.

The fear of not being believed was too heavy a burden for them.

Inmaculada García, 45, felt that weight for many years.

García affirms that between 1987 and 1989 she "had a relationship" with Vicente Santamaría, at that time the parish priest of the Church of San Jorge Mártir, in Paiporta (Valencia).

“He told me that ours was a love relationship, a special relationship that no one would understand.

It ended because I, as a person with religious beliefs, did not see it well.

The priest had fallen in love with me and it couldn't be.

It was a sin”, explains García, also president of the Association against Sexual Abuse in Childhood (ACASI) of the Valencian Community.

"Only with the passage of time and a lot of therapy, I realized that this had not been a love relationship, but child sexual abuse," she says.

Garcia was 10, 11 and 12 years old at the time.

The priest, 44, 45 and 46.

“How far did the abuse go?

There was rape, but it was without explicit violence.

There was blackmail, there was manipulation, but I never felt threatened, ”she describes.

The most serious attacks, he declares, happened at the priest's house.

After breaking up with Santamaría, García says that she stopped going to church and avoided "by all means" crossing paths with him.

García has never reported his case to the justice system, although he now speaks openly about it: “When my mother found out, I was 12 years old.

She took me to the priest's house, but I don't know what happened there, because they left me out.

She cut off all relations with the parish and took me to a psychiatrist in Valencia, who told her that she either denounced him or kept quiet.

And we are silent.

The subject was not discussed again until I was older.

I even denied it, for fear of creating an awkward situation.

Now everything is prescribed”.

Regarding the consequences, he highlights "low self-esteem", "constant worry about what others think", "sick need for approval", "difficulty meeting people" and "difficulty having relationships".

Fifteen years ago, García explains that he felt the need to look for the priest: “I met him at his sister's house.

I did not go alone, on the recommendation of the psychologist, who also recommended that I not approach him, that I not give him two kisses.

What I was going to tell him was that it hadn't been a love story;

It was called child sexual abuse and it was a crime.

He told me that he couldn't deny what he had experienced and asked me for forgiveness: 'Have you had a car?

And have you ever rear-ended another or gone off the road?' he asked me.

And I answered: 'Yes.

But that's a two-second error, not a two-year error.'”

For her, that conversation was the “

click

” of his recovery.

"A high, a radical change," she confirms.

The archdiocese of Valencia says that it has already spoken with the victim and that it opened a canonical investigation, which is still open pending a sentence.

"As long as my parents lived, this issue was not going to come to light"

Concha H. Fernández, 59, has always had a wish: that all the pain she suffered when she was 17 years old would come to light.

That is why, more than four decades later, she wrote a story for EL PAÍS where she pointed to a name: Álvaro Iglesias Fueyo, curate of the Oviedo church of San Juan el Real and head of the parish's junior movement.

"Don Álvaro, well known in the city, sexually abused me in 1979", announces H. Fernández.

One Saturday afternoon, says the victim, when everyone had gone home, the priest called her to his office located on Calle Fray Ceferino, at number 24. “He closed the door of the office and asked me to where he had the books that, according to him, he needed to read.

After a few minutes, feeling him behind me, I turned around and he pounced on me.

While he fondled my breasts,

he tried to rub his hard penis, which he hid under his pants, on my body.

Meanwhile, she told me: 'I want you, I want you'.

It was disgusting, gross, repulsive,” she recalls.

H. Fernández says that she does not know how she got rid of him, how she left that office, but she remembers going home "very scared, running, crying, very nervous."

She told her mother what had happened, and she told her father.

After a sleepless night, first thing in the morning the following day, the parents went to speak with another priest of the parish, Benedicto Santos, who had already passed away.

“A beautiful person who, yes, asked us to forgive Don Álvaro and to pray for him.

His had been a weakness of man ”, he describes.

H. Fernández never set foot in the parish house again.

His silence, he justifies himself, has lasted until his parents have passed away.

“There was nothing they could do beyond what they did.

So no one went to the police.

They would not have believed them.

Everything is impossible”, concludes H. Fernández.

Iglesias Fueyo said goodbye to the Oviedo parish of San Juan el Real in 2012, after 40 years linked to it, and became rector of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Gijón.

Since 2016 he officiates at mass at six in the afternoon in the chapel of the Slave Sisters of Oviedo.

“This person did me enormous psychological damage.

I had known him since he was seven years old, he was very close to my family and frequented my house.

His action had an incredibly negative influence on my self-esteem, my personality and the way I related to both men and religious people, whom I could hardly trust, ”concludes the woman, who, however, declares herself a believer.

The diocese of Oviedo has not responded to questions from this newspaper about whether it is investigating this case.

However, it has published a statement on its website referring to the journalistic investigation of this newspaper in which it clarifies that it will only investigate the accused in whom the complaint is "presented before the [care] office by the possible victim, with your name and not anonymously.

“He told my friends that I was making it up”

David Merino, from Madrid, ran into a wall of disbelief when he told his two best friends that he was being sexually abused by Father Carmelo.

One of them, he says, needed evidence to believe him;

the other stopped talking to him.

“It all happened in 1992 or 1993. I was 16 or 17 years old when I confessed to them that I was homosexual.

The most believer convinced me to go to a psychologist.

Said psychologist was a priest, and he would help me for free, which was good for me because he still hadn't decided to tell my parents and I couldn't pay for it, ”explains Merino.

This victim recalls that Father Carmelo's office was very close to the Franciscan Parish of San Antonio del Retiro, to which he belonged.

He describes the defendant as "tall, corpulent, dark and bald."

Merino says that he went to the office of the "priest-psychologist" on Saturdays late in the morning.

At first, “everything was kind of normal.”

But as the sessions progressed, "things changed."

“Once he knew my weak points and my fears and uncertainties, he told me that in order to overcome what was happening to me —which, according to him, had a solution— I had to lose my fear of contact with a boy's body.

At first, he only hugged me at the end of the consultation.

Of course, before lowering the blinds.

Suddenly one day he touched my genitals and asked me to touch his while he was hugging me,” he recounts.

“In the next session he lowered the blinds and hugged me, started touching my genitals and brought my hand to his.

Then he took me to the waiting room, where he had a sofa, and he forced me to give him fellatio.

Afterwards he led me to the bathroom, where he tried to penetrate me, but there I think I already resisted, ”he explains.

This survivor recognizes that there are parts of history that he has erased from his memories.

Immediately afterwards, he says, he told his friends and they went to talk to the priest.

“He told them that he was making it up for me,” he laments.

Merino, the next day, says that he went to the consultation with a tape recorder.

“I talked to the priest about what happened and I recorded everything.

I went to my friends to listen to her and one of them, the most faithful, did not even want to listen to her and stopped talking to me.

The other, my best friend,

he listened to her and verified that what she said was true”, she declares.

Merino kept those tapes, but he can't play them.

“Of the recordings, I don't have a tape player, so I haven't been able to go through the tapes I have,” he admits.

Merino's case was one of those that this newspaper delivered to the Pope in December 2021, in the first dossier.

Shortly after, the Franciscan order opened a canonical investigation and "took precautionary measures," as reported to this newspaper by the provincial secretary, Antonio Arévalo Sánchez.

They also contacted the victim to, in addition to knowing his testimony, ask for forgiveness and help him "in everything that can restore his dignity and heal his wound."

Half a year later, the canonical process is still open, awaiting a sentence.

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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