EL PAÍS launched in 2018 an investigation of pedophilia in the Spanish Church and has an updated database with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light, you can write to: abusos@elpais.es. If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: abusosamerica@elpais.es.
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"I was 19 years old and wanted to be a priest. Father Manel summoned me to his office and after asking me for all the papers, he got behind me and began to touch me in my parts. I didn't understand anything, I thought it was a fertility test or something to be religious. But I noticed that he was excited and sweating a lot. So we could not understand that a man could have sex with another man, it is something that is not in our culture. But he, when he saw children, couldn't resist." This is how Phillipe (fictitious name) begins his story, one of the victims of the Catalan Piarist religious Manel Sales, who sexually abused dozens of children and young people between 1980 and 2005 in Senegal.
He talks hurriedly on the phone. You can see the desire to tell it, to break the blanket of silence that has hidden this case for decades. "I'm not looking for money or notoriety, I'm just saying the sad reality," he says. Little by little he is reeling off some events that, in his case, occurred in 1999 at the Joseph Faye Institute in the town of Oussouye, in southern Senegal. "Finally, two classmates and I were admitted as prenovices and Father Manel gave each of us a single room at the boarding school. He came by often and if he saw that someone was sleeping, he would go into his room and try to do his little things. Then the rest of us approached to watch what he was doing and prevent him," Philippe continues.
The abuses did not occur only in Oussouye, but also in M'lomp and other villages in Senegal where Piarists are present. "He had no measure, he liked young and old," says this victim. "On weekends we went to M'lomp, from where we went out to pray. There was a boy of about 10 or 11 years old, a boy with disabilities, whom Father Manel abused many times. One day he put him in his room to force himself into it. We started shouting in diola, kata, kata, kata (leave him, leave him, leave him), until he allowed him to leave. That day, Father Manel got very angry with us," he says.
Detail of one of the walls of a classroom of the Joseph Faye School in Oussouye.Juan Luis Rod
The Pious Schools of Catalonia, together with a group of citizens, victims and experts called the Commission for the defense of sexually abused minors in the Church in Senegal, created in March 2023, made public last Thursday a statement in which they assure that Manel Sales Castellà, one of their missionaries in Senegal, had abused "a significant amount" of minors for 25 years and that the order covered the case "to protect to the institution". In this press release, the Piarists apologize to the victims and report that they have denounced the facts to the Prosecutor's Office. They also say that, after receiving the first complaints, in 2005, Sales was transferred to Catalonia, where he continued to work for the order until, in 2018, a complaint from a French citizen caused the expulsion of the missionary after a canonical process. At present, the missionary, who confessed the facts, lives in a nursing home.
However, the victims themselves claim that the abuses were known before 2005. "Everyone who moved around the priests knew that he was like that, that when he saw the children he could not resist. I think he was sick, I never saw anything like it," Philippe concludes, "at that time we had no strength to say anything, a priest was something very powerful, it was taboo to even talk about a priest. Moreover, everyone knew him in the region. When we went out to the villages, the children approached him because it was very rare to see a white man who spoke diola (the local language). He would pick them up and sit them on his thighs or put them between his legs, that excited him. A cousin of mine took off his pants and underpants and forced him, then gave him a shirt of those that Spain sent for poor children."
"Everyone knew it"
Located between the town of Ziguinchor and the tourist beach of Cap Skirring, Oussouye is a quiet village in the natural region of Casamance, known for its traditional king, spectacular trees and powerful diola culture. "Everyone knew it, it was something that was commented in a low voice," says a resident in this town, "there were people who tried to denounce in 2005 and people from the Church threatened them." The recognition now of the facts by Escola Pía de Catalunya is related to the pressure exerted by the aforementioned commission and the arrival last March of a new provincial, Jordi Vilá, who held a meeting with members of the commission in May.
Paul (not his real name) was 17 years old in 1996. At that time, Father Manel Sales was his Spanish teacher at Joseph Faye High School. "One day, he asked me to stop by his room, that he was going to give me some clothes that were sent from Spain. As soon as I entered, he closed the door and told me to come closer because we were going to measure ourselves next to a mirror he had. He started doing things to me that I didn't understand (...) he got behind me and I felt him rub against my anus. He would rub and tell me that we were going to see who was the biggest," Paul said during the investigation for the filing of the complaint. He also added that after the events he asked the other inmates at the school and that they told him that he did it regularly with other boys "to satisfy the libido and that he had even slept with some."
Louis (not his real name), another student at the institute, was also a victim of Father Manel in 1996 and his testimony is included in the complaint. "One day I was walking along the road and Father Manel Sales passed by with his motorcycle and offered to take me. We entered the priests' house and he made me sit in the living room until, a moment later, he asked me to come into his room and sit down. He came out and, when he came back, asked me to get up and turn around. I didn't know what he wanted to do, I didn't know he did that kind of thing. I turned around and felt his penis behind me. I was dressed, but he was completely naked. He took my hands and put them on his penis, moving them until he ejaculated behind me. Then he offered me notebooks, pens and candy. I was a little traumatized by this story ... I hadn't told anyone since."
The victims agree in pointing out the initial astonishment at what they lived and, later, the shame at the time of telling it, especially in a society, such as Senegal, where homosexuality is a taboo subject that is hardly talked about. "The problem is that we have all grown up, most of us have women and children, it is difficult to talk about this now, we are ashamed. We only understood what was going on when we grew up," says Phillipe.
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