The Church maintains secrecy and ignores the victims of pedophilia after a year with 500 complaints

The Spanish Catholic Church has had a year to face its first major investigation into pedophilia in Spain, which it was forced to undertake as a result of the first report by EL PAÍS, in December 2021, with 251 unpublished cases.

This number has doubled to 500 this year, with a second dossier, delivered in June, and a third, presented this month.

In total, more than 1,000 pages.

However, one year later, the balance is null: nothing is known about the response to these cases and transparency has not only not increased, but has worsened.

The Church has closed ranks and continues to refuse to reveal what it knows: this newspaper has asked the 141 entities with accusations, between orders and dioceses, about the number of cases they are aware of, how many canonical procedures they have opened and how much compensation they have paid.

More than a month later,

almost none have provided information.

The silence is overwhelming, only 13% have provided some information.

The cases of each entity and their responses can be consulted in the data tables that accompany this information.

07:19

One year after the EL PAÍS report that uncovered pedophilia in the Catholic Church

Agustín Molleda, 72, one of the victims who wrote to EL PAÍS holds an image of himself and his partner from San Cayetano, Gijón, Asturias.

December 21, 2021. Photo: MANU BRAVO |

Video: JAIME CASAL, BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ

On the other hand, attention to victims has been disappointing on most occasions, according to dozens of those affected, with erratic criteria depending on the personal sensitivity of each bishop or the politics of each congregation.

It goes from being ignored to receiving, in a few cases, up to 40,000 euros, depending on the luck of each person affected by whom they are dealt with.

EL PAÍS did not provide the identity of the victims in its reports, but offered to the Church to mediate with them so that they could collaborate in the investigation, if they so wished.

The Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), however, initially refused to coordinate this task and this newspaper had to manage contact between hundreds of complainants and dozens of entities.

Following the second report, six months later, the EEC finally decided to do so.

Forced by the Vatican, the dioceses opened victim care offices in 2020, but in many of them the contact cannot be found on their website.

The Pope is systematically disobeyed on several points: sometimes an investigation is not opened if there is no direct complaint from the victim, something that is no longer necessary;

is not informed of the possibility of compensation;

when it is done, hush clauses are imposed;

and even if there is a conviction of the abuser, the victim is not given the information on the case, not even the name of the accused when she does not remember him, but he has been identified by the Church.

Although it sentences the defendant, it also does not reveal where he has been assigned: for example, the diocese of Orihuela-Alicante has refused to report the destinations of a pedophile priest for 35 years.

Frequently, the response is limited to treating the complaint of abuse exclusively as a legal matter, without contemplating listening and help.

In many places, the first reaction with the victim is not welcoming, but mistrust and questioning.

In small populations, it is sometimes accompanied by social rejection of the person reporting.

An example of a lack of empathy is the case of Roberto, the fictitious name of one of the complainants in the first report of this newspaper, in December 2021. In the diocese of Orihuela-Alicante they managed to identify him and went to look for him directly at his home for a few days later.

“He was at home and they called the phone.

It was the voice of a woman who told me: 'Open up, I've come to talk about the abuse.'

I was filled with panic, I didn't know how they found me, ”she explains.

Roberto got out and, according to his story, they invited him to get into a car and took him to a church where the attorney general of the diocese was.

He subjected him to an interrogation.

“They told me that my statements had contradictions.

I was very nervous about everything that was happening.

I felt like a terrorist, ”he narrates.

This victim, who accuses a priest with the initials FNC of abuse between 1998 and 1999, affirms that the meetings continued at her home: “They locked themselves in the living room with my mother to ask her questions, they stayed with some of my friends... No I endured more, I suffered rashes and I had to go back to the psychologist.

I told the diocese that I wanted nothing to do with them."

Roberto, in fact, is afraid that, by telling his story in the press, the Church will knock on his door again.

In any case, what orders and dioceses are doing with the complaints is a mystery.

Only four bishoprics have responded to EL PAÍS about their actions in cases that affect them: Tarragona, Cartagena, Bilbao and Madrid.

The latter has been the only one to make a precise description of the status of each process, together with the names of the accused and their destinations.

The Madrid archdiocese is one of the few that has shown a credible commitment to find out the truth and listen to the victims, with the launch of the Repara attention service.

There have been two dioceses, Astorga and Pamplona-Tudela, that have not even responded to the query.

Only in 12 there are no cases or they claim not to know of any accusation: Barbastro-Monzón, Cádiz-Ceuta, Huesca, León, Lleida, Menorca, Mondoñedo-Ferrol, Osma-Soria, Sigüenza-Guadalajara, Urgell, Vitoria and the military archbishopric.

As for the warrants, only eight have agreed to report on their cases.

The rest, 34, have not answered.

The Church has always been in the tow of the scandal: it has gone from denying that there were cases in Spain to recognizing 220, in April 2021, and a year later, suddenly, 506, without giving any details.

There are still no more figures than the accounting that this newspaper keeps in an open database that feeds on information from the media and sentences: they already amount to 906 accused clergy and laymen and at least 1,713 victims.

Four years ago, when EL PAÍS began its investigation, there were only 34 defendants.

The secrecy remains: no order or diocese wants to report how many complaints, in addition to those sent by this newspaper and those that have come to light through other channels, have reached their victim care offices.

Some that until now did so, and provided details of the cases in the investigations of this newspaper, have stopped doing so.

Now the most frequent answer is that they send their data to the Episcopal Conference.

But the EEC does not respond either.

The body of the bishops has gone from maintaining that it was ignorant of the number of cases in Spain, hiding behind the fact that it could not request data from the dioceses, because it did not have authority over them, to

indicate to the bishops what information they must deliver to the Prosecutor's Office and demand that they send all the information to the EEC.

The result remains the same, total opacity.

In theory, the information is being centralized to offer it next March, according to internal documents.

The law firm Cremades & Calvo Sotelo, commissioned by the EEC to audit the abuses in February, is compiling the information.

The bishops, who had always refused to commission an external investigation as in France or Germany, took this step as a result of the impact of the first report by EL PAÍS, and before the first reaction from the institutions: in March Congress ordered an investigation into Ombudsman.

The audit of the Madrid firm is not really an in-depth investigation: they are limiting themselves to asking the dioceses to provide them with the data they have.

They are not going to review the files personally.

“He has asked us for documentation and we gave it to him.

The work is being done by us, we can reserve the documentation that we want”, criticizes a high-ranking bishopric.

On the other hand, the firm affirms that "it is having numerous meetings with the bishops" in their episcopal headquarters.

The office's complaint mailbox, accused by some associations of victims of lack of credibility, is not working either: the latest information from the office put the testimonies received at more than a hundred.

Although they are also reaching them through other channels, such as victims' associations and organizations such as Save The Children.

“We are not focusing on the number of testimonials.

Cremades already has enough for the heart of the study: repair and prevention”, replies a spokesperson, who specifies that the audit delivery date will be before June.

The Ombudsman, who opened another victim care email, has collected 400 since he began his work in July.

More than 1,000 people have already written to EL PAÍS since 2018.

If secrecy and slowness predominate on the investigation side (although canonical norms establish that the process last three months), anarchy reigns in the attention to victims.

There are no common criteria.

Numerous victims recount very hurt the "disastrous" response they have had from bishops and orders, often clumsy in the mere human management of the problem.

As in the previous case of Alicante, Concha H. Fernández, who told her story in EL PAÍS in August 2022, the diocese of Oviedo also managed to identify her.

Her first contact with her, after recounting the abuses of the priest Álvaro Iglesias Fueyo in the 1970s, was simply to send her a letter to her work, summoning her for an interrogation with the canonical prosecutor four days later.

“I was stunned, it was as if they told me that they knew who I was and where I lived, like the mafia.

Zero sensitivity.

On top of that, the priest continues where he was, giving mass, and there are people who have stopped greeting me.

This is still like Vetusta in

.

Now I understand that my parents did not denounce when I told them.

If it's like that now, in the 1970s I don't even want to think about it”.

Concha, a believer and who was very involved in her parish until the day she suffered abuse, has had "a huge disappointment" with the Church.

"They feel above good and evil, and the message is that the priest's word is worth more than mine."

She responded to the summons with a letter saying that she would not come from her and she only hoped that the priest would ask her for forgiveness.

Consulted by this newspaper, the diocese of Oviedo does not respond.

In August, when the case was published, she did not either.

However, she reported on her website that she would investigate the defendants when the complaint is "presented by the possible victim, with her name and not anonymously."

The largest orders, and with the greatest number of cases, such as the Marists and Jesuits, are the ones that have made the most progress in establishing care protocols for victims that include compensation, as well as therapeutic assistance.

However, those affected often resent the bureaucratic coldness of the process, with the intervention of lawyers.

According to the cases known to this newspaper, the Jesuits are paying a maximum of 15,000 euros in the most serious cases, based on a rate that previously contemplates minor (5,000 euros) and medium (10,000) abuses.

The Marists are resorting in some cases to the mediation of the Betania association and have come to pay 35,000 euros, but, on the other hand, on other occasions they do not even mention the possibility of compensation.

The Salesians have also begun to pay similar amounts.

But all in the midst of great secrecy, fearing a knock-on effect.

As for the bishoprics, none in Spain admits having paid compensation, although some are doing so.

A person in charge of a diocese explains that the first thing he tells the victims is that they will investigate their case and if it is plausible they will pay him 40,000 euros, but this is an exception.

EL PAÍS has calculated, according to the few sentences that are known, that the Spanish Church has already been forced to pay at least two million euros in compensation to 173 victims in the last four decades.

In a case of abuse at the Marist school in Malaga, the congregation agreed with the victim for compensation of 35,000 euros, but refused to give him the name of the aggressor, whom he identified in a photo.

He only remembered that his name was Don José and that she was his tutor in the fifth grade in 1973. Don José, says the victim, lived next to the school and began to take a classmate to his house.

“Then he told us that he had masturbated him and he had masturbated the teacher.

That made us curious, and we wanted to go to his house, and in the end he once took me.”

There he also abused him.

He was 10 years old.

He remembers that a few days later he was another classmate, but then he told his parents.

They denounced him and the center fired the teacher.

“He was expelled, but no file was opened for him.

Everything was covered.

He would go to another school.

I have asked, but they have not told me either, ”he says.

Nothing is known about whether they have investigated the cover-up.

“So the children were not asked or interested in us.

His response was to send us another teacher, a kind of sergeant, who was brutal with us.

What happened to this victim marked her life, but she now says that she has been satisfied with the attention received from the order.

"Wash your hands"

Others have not been so lucky.

EA, for example, narrates a frustrating experience with the Jesuits for the abuses that he denounces in the SAFA seminary of the order in Úbeda (Jaén), between 1969 and 1970. He accuses the secular professor GMQ “He dazzled us all.

He was young, very active, a soccer goalkeeper, a handball player, he played the drums.

We had it mythologized.

When we went to bed he would play music for us,

, he was modern”.

But he had another face.

At the boarding school they could go home at the weekend, but EA preferred to sleep there already on Sunday, so as not to have to get up early.

He lived in a farmhouse and had to walk four kilometers.

“We were few and then he sent us all to a room.

That was her corral and she did what she wanted with us.

She would get into bed and commit all kinds of sexual outrages.

Touching my parts, she sucked on my neck, bit and sucked on my ears and she tried to make me turn around to put her tongue in my mouth.

It was all disgusting, I wanted to die, ”she recounts.

EA remembers that the abuses left a mark on him: he began to get bad grades, lost his scholarship and had to stop studying.

His family was poor and he started working.

He contacted the Jesuits two years ago, in January 2021, and requested two things: that they ask for forgiveness and compensation, but the order replies that the defendant was secular, then left the center and does not contemplate compensation.

“This is free, fuck your life is it free?

This gentleman was an employee of yours who hurt many people and the Jesuits have a responsibility.

Wash your hands".

The response that the Company has given him is for him to write to the Ombudsman and the Episcopal Conference.

The worst thing is that EA has followed the trail of this teacher and settled in a nearby municipality of Jaén where for years he has kept in contact with children as a physical education teacher and sports coach.

Photos of him with minors abound on the internet.

The Jesuits tracked him down to mediate with the victim, but he denied the accusations and refused to apologize for anything.

07:19

One year after the EL PAÍS report that uncovered pedophilia in the Catholic Church

Agustín Molleda, one of the victims who wrote to EL PAÍS, holds an image of him and his partner from San Cayetano (Gijón), in December 2021. Photo: MANU BRAVO |

Video: JAIME CASAL, BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ

Other orders, such as La Salle, use the technique of transferring cases to the Prosecutor's Office to direct them to a siding and disengage: as prescribed, they are always archived and then the order does not open any internal investigation.

The case of brother Joaquín Berruguete is flagrant: EL PAÍS records at least 14 of his victims, between 1976 and 1994, in two schools, in Santander and Santiago de Compostela.

The complaints describe him as a predator who has left a trail of victims, but so far the order has not provided any explanation.

“In addition to being a math teacher, I was in the infirmary.

When you went, I would lower your pants, even if it was not necessary and while I was pouring mercromine on you, I would put my hand under your underwear and touch you, ”says AL, a former student from the Cantabrian school.

"In addition to the constant touching in class, another thing he did was get into the showers in the gym, when we were taking a shower."

In February 2022, he reported it to the director of the center, who directed him to a La Salle lawyer.

“We reported it to the Prosecutor's Office and everything was very fast, after a week the case was filed, and that's where it all ended.

La Salle then has not told me anything else, nor has he offered me financial compensation, ”says the affected person.

“There must be dozens of victims.

I think by now, as much as the director has told me he's sorry, it's not just about that."

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

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