The Church already recognizes more than 1,000 cases of pedophilia after years of denying the scandal

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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On the same day that Archbishop Luis Argüello was elected new president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), this Tuesday, the entity recognized in its report on abuses a total of 1,057 cases of

pedophilia

within it.

And it was Argüello himself who three years ago, when he was secretary general of the EEC, defended that the complaints in Spain were “zero or very few”, and did not admit the first figures of the problem until April 2021. The denial of the scandal has This has been the position of the Spanish Church since this newspaper began its investigation into clerical pedophilia more than five years ago, in 2018.

The Spanish Church has thus surpassed the barrier of 1,000 cases, but it has done so silently, with a simple update of the PDF document of the report that it has on the EEC website.

In this way, he is getting closer, without acknowledging it, to the figures of the reports that he has criticized and disdained, such as the audit that he commissioned from the Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo law firm, the Ombudsman's study, and the investigative work of THE COUNTRY.

This newspaper has delivered to the EEC and the Vatican, between 2021 and 2023, a total of four reports with more than 700 testimonies against 545 accused.

In addition, it has a public database that is the only one that details all the cases that have come to light through any means, such as the press, court rulings or admission by ecclesiastical institutions.

It has not been the only time that the bishops have touched up the scandal figures since they presented their own report on December 21.

At that time, they admitted 806 cases in a study published, by surprise, to try to counteract the data of the audit commissioned to the law firm, presented that same day, which indicated many more cases, a total of 1,382 and 2,056 victims (the CEE report forgot to give a number of the latter).

However, since then the EEC has been forced to rectify its figures at least six times. The reason?

As EL PAÍS revealed on February 26, the bishops left out of their report more than 600 already known cases, if contrasted with the public database of this newspaper, which currently indicates 1,460 cases and at least 2,608 victims. .

What's more, the most flagrant among them is that the EEC hid at least 325 cases already recognized by the dioceses and religious orders from the Ombudsman, who in his report last October also gave a higher number of cases, 1,281. .

Orders and dioceses did report to the public institution at least 1,385 victims, a figure that was also missing from the bishops' report.

Furthermore, 15 congregations and 10 dioceses sent more cases to the Ombudsman – a total of 89 – than those later recorded by the bishops.

This exclusion of cases, in fact, caused discomfort in dioceses and orders, which protested to the EEC when they saw how the number of complaints they had reported had been reduced.

Ecclesiastical sources accused “the plumbers of the EEC” of “manipulating the figures” and the religious orders, which had not participated in the preparation of the document and until now have been excluded from decision-making, did not hide their indignation.

In total, 39 orders that have already admitted cases of abuse did not appear in the episcopal report.

The day after the publication of the news, CONFER, a parallel entity to the EEC that brings together religious congregations, announced that it was creating its own office to care for victims.

“We congregations are tired of how bishops make decisions on this issue unilaterally.

We would like to participate as equals in the initiatives and row together so that the truth comes to light,” lamented a source from one order.

After surpassing the barrier of 1,000 admitted cases, the figure is destined to grow, since there are still orders that do not yet appear on the EEC list.

Some of them with well-known cases with media coverage, such as those of the Montserrat Abbey, admitted by the order itself, or some of the internal provinces of Piarists and Claretians.

Finally, the Marists, the second congregation with the most known cases in Spain, have appeared in the latest update of the report, which inexplicably had not been included.

One of its four provinces is still missing, but this incorporation has already suddenly added a total of 233 cases that were not previously included in the document.

In any case, the Catalan province of the Marists remains unregistered, which is where the case with the most media impact arose in 2016, the first major scandal of clerical abuse in Spain, uncovered by

El Periódico de Catalunya

.

In this thousand cases that the bishops now admit, there is one fact that stands out above the rest: within the peculiar classification that the EEC has made, it only considers “proven” or “not proven, but credible” a total of 358 and, of course, In fact, there are more that it considers “not proven”, 366. That is, if it is compared with the total number of cases that it admits to knowing, it means that the Spanish Church only believes 3 out of every 10 victims.

But that portion is even smaller when compared to the total number of actually known cases, 1,460 accused, according to this newspaper's accounting: the EEC only considers 2 out of every 10 cases credible.

On the other hand, the lack of transparency of the bishops and the little information they provide casts a haze over the data of the

To Give Light study.

The EEC continues without giving explanations for the complaints known to it and refuses to give specific information about each of the cases - dates, places, initials of the accused -, just as the bishops of other countries do for the sake of transparency and to help bring more victims to light.

Furthermore, the report still does not explain which cases of the 545 delivered by this newspaper to the Church in four reports are part of that accounting and which have been discarded and why.

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