EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish Church in 2018 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 us at:
Abusos@elpais.es
.
If it is a case in Latin America, the address is:
Abusamerica@elpais.es
.
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The report on pedophilia in the Church that the Episcopal Conference (CEE) presented in December as “the most complete of those in existence” and called
To give light
, is actually full of shadows, hides relevant information, contains numerous inconsistencies and makes more difficult to know the truth about this scourge.
A detailed analysis reveals, at the outset, that it includes only a list of 806 known cases of pedophilia, a figure that deflates and contradicts those already admitted by the Church itself: it excludes at least 325 that have already been communicated by orders and dioceses to the Ombudsman. Pueblo, as can be seen from the cross-checking of data with the list of the public entity's report, presented just a month and a half before.
These cases have disappeared from the bishops' report.
Asked about this, the EEC responds that it does not know the reason, "but it may be because different things have been requested, at different times."
“We gave the data to the Ombudsman, but he has not given it to us,” explains his press officer, José Gabriel Vera, although the Ombudsman's report has been public since October and the EEC has assured that it has crossed its data with it.
Regarding the different published reports, he adds: “Each one has its methodology and its criteria for action and we can say that they are parallel.
We have detected numerous cases that appear in several of them.
We have offered our collaboration by making available the information we have, but, although we are determined that our report does not leave out any case, we have not received sufficient information to be able to do so."
However, the orders and dioceses consulted assure that they have sent the same information to the Ombudsman as to the bishops.
In any case, the number of complaints ignored by the Church is even greater, at least 654, if the official figure of the EEC is compared with the accused clerics who are actually known: so far, 1,460, with at least 2,608 victims, according to the public database of EL PAÍS, the only one that details all the known cases - with initials of the accused, place and date of the events and source of the information - and compiles those that have come to light by any means, such as press, judicial rulings or admission by the Church itself.
By disdaining these cases, the Spanish Church disobeys the Pope, who forces each possible abuse to be investigated in the face of the slightest information, including that from the media.
Regarding this, the CEE replies that “it does not have access to the database”, although it has been public for almost three years in the digital edition of the newspaper.
Furthermore, the Church forgets, in almost a thousand pages of report, to detail the number of victims.
It only cites a figure from its last calculation from June 2023, which spoke of 927. On the other hand, orders and dioceses did inform the Ombudsman of at least 1,385 victims.
Breaking down the data, there are at least 39 orders that have been dropped from the report
To shed light
: they acknowledged cases to the Ombudsman - a total of 236 complaints - and they do not even appear on the bishops' list.
And there would not be a prior error in the Ombudsman's numbers, since no order had anything to say to that report and CONFER, the organization that brings together Spanish congregations, even thanked the entity for the work carried out in a public note.
But there are even more orders that have disappeared from the study's accounting, because the document itself details a CONFER list of congregations that have reported cases, and there are three not recorded until now that later appear in the tables without any known case or with the phrase “no data available”.
The most obvious example of the gaps in the CEE study is that the Marists, the second congregation with the highest number of complaints after the Jesuits, are not included.
However, this order already recognized 130 to the Defender and has 137 in this newspaper's count.
Sources from this order affirm that they sent the EEC “everything they asked for” and that they do not know why they do not appear in the study.
In addition to the orders that do not appear in the report, 15 congregations and 10 dioceses sent more cases to the Ombudsman - a total of 89 - than are later recorded by the bishops.
Among the orders, for example, only one of the three provinces of the Piarists appears with 8 cases, when the order admitted 32 to the Defender, and there are 45 on the list of this newspaper - it is the fifth with the most accusations.
As for the dioceses, that of Barcelona declared 39 cases to the Ombudsman, which drops to 24 in the bishops' study.
The one in Alcalá de Henares reported 10 to the public entity, but the CEE counts only three.
Cuenca admitted 10, but then only five appear.
Cartagena, eight, which later become five.
However, there are also several contrary cases, of bishoprics that have revealed more cases to
To Give Light
than to the Ombudsman.
In fact, it is clear that several dioceses hid information from him and did not collaborate with his investigation: the 70 bishoprics, except the military one, appear with cases in the episcopal report, but there were seven that did not communicate any to Ángel Gabilondo's team.
It is even more surprising that orders with cases that have had significant media coverage but do not seem to exist for the Church do not appear in the Church report.
For example, the abuses in the Abbey of Montserrat, which the monastery itself recognized;
or the case of the San José school of the Mennaisians of Bermeo between the seventies and eighties, discovered by ETB in 2022, although the accused even admitted the accusations in a video.
The same occurs with the order of San Viator, which has one of the most serious cases known, that of José Ángel Arregui Eraña, arrested in Chile in 2010 and who had abused at least 17 minors in Spanish schools.
This congregation admitted 12 cases to the Ombudsman, but they do not appear in the bishops' report.
In short, it is not only that cases from the past have not been counted, or those hidden in the archives, but that many that have already appeared in the media are ignored.
The chaos of the document, ecclesiastical sources reveal, is due in part to improvisation and the rush to have an alternative report ready in time that would eclipse the audit commissioned by the EEC itself from the law firm Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo, which points out many more cases, a total of 1,382, with 2,056 victims, and is critical of the Church.
What's more, the bishops had a
mole
in the audit, who wrote a benevolent report and cut the number of cases until he was fired by the firm, to be later signed by the EEC itself.
The bishops made both reports public, theirs and that of the audit, in an unusual way: without a press conference or answering questions, on the eve of the Christmas lottery and within a few hours of each other.
They disclosed the EEC report first and relegated the law firm's report, although it cost them more than a million euros.
Both studies were a thousand pages long and the media had to read it in a few hours, without prior notice.
In no Catholic country has the Church disdained or even presented a study on abuse commissioned by the bishops themselves.
However, other omissions in the document do not seem to be the result of errors, but deliberate, two episcopal sources point out, and that has had consequences.
At least a dozen dioceses and several orders, these sources point out, have expressed their discomfort to the EEC in recent weeks because the figures they have communicated do not correspond to those published, have been cut, and they regret that it may give the impression of who have hidden information, when the responsibility lies with whoever collected the data.
Bishoprics and congregations have begun to protest in the EEC when they have discovered these tweaks in figures, and some have done so following inquiries from this newspaper to find out the details of their cases.
“Many dioceses are fed up with the plumbers of the Episcopal Conference,” says a senior official of a diocese.
"They have manipulated the figures, they have not been errors with the numbers, the final objective is that fewer cases emerge to overshadow the Cremades audit."
He believes that the laundered data of the bishops' mole
at the law firm
has been used as a reference .
“The only thing this does is boycott the offices of the dioceses that are working well and have committed themselves to the fight against abuse,” laments another episcopal source.
The truth is that, after complaints, the EEC has been silently correcting the document, with new updates to the PDF available on the web that erased the previous ones.
This newspaper has downloaded at least four new versions that rectified the data.
What's more, on the last occasion, at the end of this month, the document's correction date was moved back to February 1, 2024. The author of these constant tweaks, as it appears in the metadata of the digital document, is the director of press of the bishops, José Gabriel Vera.
Regarding the corrections to the report, this person in charge responds: “
To shed light
, it is a living report that continues to receive data and incorporates it as it is received.
Since the last edition in December there are some congregations and dioceses and other religious institutions that have been contacted to update their data and their contributions have been incorporated and this will continue to be done in the future.
Vera gave the only statement to the media after the report
To shed light,
to justify not providing details of the cases, because the CEE cares more about people than lists.
She explained to TV3, shockingly: “Enough of reducing the victims to figures.
Enough, because if we don't hurt them.
We get involved in the fun thing of seeing who has the longest… the number, of course.”
From left to right: César García Magán, secretary general of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), Cardinal Juan José Omella, president of the entity, and José Gabriel Vera, its communications director.Andrea Comas
At the time of publishing this article, the number of admitted cases had already been corrected and raised from 806 to 822. The CEE details that the “registered” cases are all those that have been “reported, communicated, made known or known by the Church, through the various possible ways and channels, regardless of whether they have been verified or proven or not.
That is, it should be equal to or greater than the 1,460 accused currently recorded by this newspaper in its database, which is public and has been periodically updated since April 2021.
On the contrary, both the Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo audit and the Ombudsman's report emphasize that one of the main sources of information on cases is the EL PAÍS investigation, which began in 2018, and indicate that many orders and dioceses like this They admit it.
The gap between the cases that orders and dioceses say they know about and those that are actually known is surprising in many entities.
The order with the most cases revealed, the Jesuits, has reported 119 to the EEC, but at least 162 are known, according to this newspaper's accounting.
The Salesians, the third congregation in number of cases, admit 75, but in reality they have already revealed 116. This is only in terms of the number of cases simply recorded, before assessing whether they are credible or not.
Also notable, on some occasions, is the difference between known cases and those finally admitted as proven or credible.
Especially in the orders most reluctant to investigate and care for victims.
La Salle, for example, only claims to know of 29 cases, when this newspaper alone has already communicated 43 in its successive reports and a total of 70 are publicly known. But what's more, in total, La Salle only admits two as proven.
The diocese of Bilbao has registered 34 cases, but at the moment only considers one proven and another credible.
The Spanish Church only believes one in 10 victims
On the other hand, among the cases ignored by the Church report, it can be deduced that there are more than half a thousand of those collected by this newspaper in four successive dossiers and sent to the Church and the Vatican between 2021 and 2023, because the Church report CEE indicates that it is only considering 191, although it does not explain why.
It is plausible that it only counts those in which the victim, through this newspaper, agreed to give a statement before the Church.
The rest have distrusted the institution, also due to the numerous testimonies of neglect and re-victimization of those who went to the Church to denounce, and have preferred to contact the Ombudsman.
Or still waiting for the Government to launch an independent public care office for victims.
The next step of the report with the registered cases is to classify them as proven, credible or not proven, in addition to others excluded or under investigation.
The EEC affirms that this order “arises from the meticulous study of each of the cases,” and concludes that it only admits a total of 275 as proven or credible. But in the latest correction of the report it even reduces that figure to 237. Another 75 are still under investigation.
That is to say, a general skepticism prevails towards the testimonies of the victims and the denial of their accusations: the Church only recognizes 16%
of the known cases in Spain, taking as reference the EL PAÍS database and only considering the number of accused.
In short, the Spanish Church only believes one in 10 victims.
This data gives a clear clue about the attitude of the Church when it comes to facing upcoming compensation, as it has promised.
What's more, the victims are not informed of all this: none of the hundreds who are in contact with this newspaper and have gone to dioceses and orders have been told that their case is not considered proven, in the same way that they are not informs of the right to compensation.
The usual thing is not to inform them of anything and leave them in limbo.
For the bishops there are 280 “unproven” cases, which even rise to 314 in the latest rectification.
That is, they have not been taken into consideration "because they are cases of whose certainty or, at least plausibility, there are no rational indications."
Similarly,
To Give Birth
records three “false or manifestly unfounded complaints” in the dioceses of Getafe, Guadix and Oviedo, which in the latest rectification were reduced to two, although the three continue to appear in the section for each of those. bishoprics.
To increase the confusion, the December report did not include the sum of all proven cases, unproven cases and other categories: there were 670, compared to a total of 806 declared.
It is not detailed what had happened to 136 volatilized cases in that sum.
However, in the last correction a new category of cases “not attributable to that institution” suddenly appears, mainly those collected by dioceses corresponding to orders, which admits 121 new cases, although it is not explained what has been done with them. , nor whether they are considered credible or not.
The essential problem lies in the total lack of transparency of the Church about what it knows about the abuses and the known cases.
The bishops increase the confusion by refusing to publish, as other European or US episcopal conferences have already done, a single list of aggressors, place and date of the events, which allows us to know exactly the details of each case.
The Church only gives numbers, and only for two years, forced by media pressure, since until 2021 it maintained that the cases in Spain were "zero or very few."
This newspaper has been asking 70 dioceses for more than three years and at least 100
orders for the details of each case and the result of the investigations, without response.
It contributes to the chaos that each diocese and order goes it alone, with its own criteria, and there are no single and mandatory rules for everyone, with a general decree, because the Spanish Church has avoided it.
However, despite the opacity, this newspaper has been cross-checking new data from the EEC, the Ombudsman and its own for weeks and has identified at least 76
new cases that have already been incorporated into the database, although only with the few details that have been reported.
It is simply known that a diocese or an order admits a new case, but hides what it is, where it occurred, in what year, what it has done with it.
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