The secret list of abuses of minors that the Church has always hidden

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 of day, 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 best kept secret of the Spanish Church, which cases of pedophilia by the clergy it admits to knowing, their details and how it has managed them, a mass of information hidden until now, comes to light. EL PAÍS has accessed the breakdown list of the 806 cases that the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) has recognized in its report

To shed light

presented last December, where only the general figures appear, and makes it available to the victims, who are rarely informed of how their case has been handled. One of the keys to the document is that it indicates which complaints it considers credible and which are not, an unprecedented classification in pedophile reports from the Catholic world, which seeks to reduce the official number of cases. Furthermore, it is something that is not communicated to the victims. What's more, the president of the EEC, Luis Argüello, received six victims of abuse last week, who did not know that precisely four of them are cases that the Church does not believe, classified as unproven or that do not count for the accounting of your internal document. One of them, for example, is the case of the Gaztelueta school of the Opus Dei, with a final sentence of 2 years in prison in the Supreme Court in 2020, but which the Church registers as “Does not count. Investigation in progress / Pending resolution”, because the canonical investigation, which the Pope ordered to restart, is still open.

The Church has massively ignored one of the victims' main demands: that the truth be known. This document, in which neither aggressors nor victims are identified, allows us to verify how the Church has been working, which does not investigate many cases (more than a quarter of the total), what compensation it pays, how it questions those who report abuse and what accusations you believe and which you don't. Furthermore, it clarifies something very confusing: how the EEC report was made. In reality, it is a simple cut and paste from the study that Alfredo Dagnino, the mole, leaked to the bishops in the summer.

that the EEC had in the audit of the Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo firm, which it commissioned an external investigation of the scandal in 2022.

This detailed list of the cases that are now coming to light is found in the report that Dagnino sent to the bishops, which this newspaper has accessed and where it has verified that the list of the 806 complaints, by diocese and order, is exactly the same. which is then reproduced by the EEC study. What's more, according to a plagiarism detection program, up to 62.3% of the bishops' document is identical or very similar to Dagnino's report. Even the same typos are repeated. It is the culmination of a complex soap opera that has ended up muddying something as delicate as the Church's response to victims of abuse.

The president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), Archbishop Luis Argüello, fourth from the right, together with a group of victims of abuse in the Church, on March 25.

As this newspaper revealed, Alfredo Dagnino, jurist, former president of the Catholic Association of Propagandists (ACdP) and with positions in the past in Intereconomía, Cope and Radio María, was on the Cremades investigation commission. A member of the office, he was in charge of coordinating data collection, and who met with dioceses and orders for a year. However, he then prepared a report on his behalf, without agreeing on it with the rest of the team, according to sources from that commission, and in the summer of 2023 he sent it to the bishops behind the firm's back. This opened a schism between Cremades and the EEC: the office, which fired Dagnino in the summer of 2023, warned that this report, which significantly reduced the number of cases and was benevolent towards the Church, should not be taken into account. But the bishops seized on that job, which reflected their vision of the problem, and even hired Dagnino. When Cremades finally submitted his report last December, he was critical of the Church, stressed the responsibility of the bishops and counted many more cases: at least 1,382 and 2,056 victims. But the EEC prepared its own study to eclipse it: it limited itself to cutting and pasting Dagnino's with slight adjustments. He also added almost the entire first edition of his report

To Give Light,

from May 2023. He presented it on the same day as the external audit, the eve of the Christmas lottery, but published his own first, presented as an update of December,

To give light

. The Spanish Church is the only one in the world that has renounced and tried to torpedo the external investigation it has commissioned into the scandal.

The bishops' report was surprising because, despite being presented as “the most complete of those in existence,” it was full of omissions, inconsistencies and errors, and now we discover why. According to the ecclesiastical and episcopal sources consulted, this “sloppy” report, which cuts and pastes without cross-referencing or updating data, was the work of José Gabriel Vera, communications director. Vera, who did not want to clarify who the author of the report is, assures that it was approved by the executive commission of the bishops last December. He defends his right to use Dagnino's report, rejected by the firm: “The report sent by the Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo firm is nothing more than the latest version of the deliveries that the firm sent to the Episcopal Conference during the assignment. by the person who was leading the team at that time, according to the office itself. This is a job for which the Conference had paid more than 1.2 million euros and in which, according to what they indicated, more than 30 people from the office had participated." In reality, the firm has assured that Dagnino's report was its work and behind the law firm's knowledge. Regarding the fact that a good part of the lawyer's report has been literally copied, Vera points out that “it is about work material for which payment had been made, and in whose preparation the Conference had participated in different phases, and it was assumed in those aspects in which that was considered of interest for the purpose of the report.” Regarding the classification of the complaints by a single person, Vera insists that “they were carried out by the office team, and that is how it was invoiced and communicated to us in the different meetings held over a year (…) It is the result of teamwork of the office following a methodology presented by the office and approved by the Conference.” Sources from the audit work team deny it.

In this official accounting of 806 cases, as this newspaper discovered, more than 300 that orders and dioceses had already recognized to the Ombudsman's investigation commission were left out, and up to a total of 600 compared to the database of this newspaper, the only one that includes all those known in Spain through different means. At this moment it registers 1,460 cases and 2,608 victims. The CEE did not verify anything, despite the fact that it has its own data that dioceses and orders periodically send to it. He did not review Dagnino's list, he did not cross-check it with his own updated data, and that is why he did not realize that even orders with numerous cases were missing, such as the Marists or part of the Piarists. Then it has been silently correcting errors with updates to the document posted on its website.

These glaring absences are due to the fact that some orders had not yet responded when Dagnino leaked his report, but in other cases it was the lawyer himself who suppressed, at his discretion, many other cases already reported, which in his list do not even appear as “ registered.” This newspaper has verified with dioceses and orders that informed it of more cases than those that later appear registered on its list. For this reason, when the report

To Give Light

was released

, which was limited to copying that shortened list, many congregations and bishoprics protested to the EEC and expressed their displeasure. Although they did not know who were “the plumbers of the Episcopal Conference” who had manipulated the figures. Now it is known.

The bishops had to admit at their March plenary assembly “a very significant error” in the case count in their report, but they also did not explain the reason. It is also now understood that the bishops' report did not give a total number of victims: Dagnino did not count them. The great novelty contained in his report is that detailed list of the 806 admitted cases that the bishops later took care to eliminate from theirs. This secret list, which the Spanish Church has always hidden, uncovers a huge amount of information unknown until now, although not all entities have provided the same data. For example, in many cases the place of the events, or even the date, is still missing. What is relevant is that, first of all, it allows us to reveal how the Church questions the victims in the vast majority of cases and what complaints it considers credible. Because the greatest oddity of Dagnino's report, which is unusual in the rest of the Catholic countries and the EEC has assumed as its own, is classifying the cases as “proven”, “not proven but credible” and “not proven”. In addition to others that are excluded from the accounting, discarding the testimony of the victim, because the accused had died, or was a layman, or the case had prescribed.

“They invented that classification,” says an official from a diocese committed to the fight against abuse. “It does not exist in any child abuse protocol in the world, in any reference report from all the countries where these cases have had to be responded to, I have never seen it. It has been decided without knowing the case directly or consulting the dioceses and orders that have handled it. They have done a lot of harm to those who have tried to do their jobs well. "It is a lack of respect for the victims, and it has been done only to disguise the number of cases."

Eight dioceses and two religious orders have confirmed to EL PAÍS that the classification of cases as proven or unproven is not their work, and when sending the data they never considered whether they were credible or not. That is to say, everything was cooked behind his back. The final objective of Dagnino and the EEC has been to try to reduce the dimension of the scandal to the minimum possible: in fact, in total, the Church barely believes it to be 237, one in ten, if compared with the number of those known so far in EL PAÍS database, 1,460 accused, an even lower percentage when compared to the number of victims, 2,608. It is a transcendental fact if you think about the next step that the Church has announced: compensation for the victims, where it may have to pay hundreds of thousands of euros. The average in other episcopal conferences has been 35,000 euros for each victim. The paradox is that Cremades's final report, which he has despised and tried to ignore, has cost the EEC more than a million euros.

But the most amazing thing is that the person who has decided something as complex and sensitive as determining whether a case is credible or not has not been a team of experts, or someone who has handled the case and knows it closely, but rather it has been a single person, Alfredo Dagnino, confirm sources from the audit commission who worked with him. Furthermore, he is not a criminalist either. Afterwards, the EEC took it over as is. Dagnino, in response to this newspaper, has declined to make any assessments, nor clarify whether he authorized the EEC to use his report, and has only specified: “I have been out of this matter since October and therefore anything after that is completely foreign to me.” ”.

In this way, hundreds of victims will now discover that their testimony has not been valued and the Church does not believe them. They will know it now because no one in the Church has ever told them, it only appears secretly in this document. A two-way game is perceived in many situations, where the victim may perceive that she is believed, but then internally, for bureaucratic purposes, she is not. In the diocese of Lleida, for example, there is a case in which it is reported that the bishop has asked the victim for forgiveness, but then it is listed as “not proven.” In Valladolid, diocese of the current president of the EEC, Luis Argüello, “accompaniment” is provided to the victim of a case of the Diocesan Operators, but the truth is that they consider it “not proven.” Even in a case from the diocese of Barcelona, ​​the accused admitted the facts and compensated the victim with 30,000 euros, and it is listed as “not proven, but credible.” The same occurs with the case of the Seminary of the People of God, a group dissolved in Catalonia in 2017 for heresy and sect practices, where it is now discovered that there were also accusations of sexual abuse: there is a recognition of the facts by the accused priest , and is considered “not proven, but plausible.”

There are cases that have had a media impact, and that also involve in many cases victims who have later been very active in denouncing the scandal, but have not been counted as credible. Like the heartbreaking testimony of the writer Alejandro Palomas, who suffered abuse from a La Salle brother. In Estella, Navarra, the case of the Puy school is not considered proven or credible either, where dozens of people are estimated to have been affected and which was one of those that led to the creation of a victims' association in the regional community. Its president was also in the group that received the president of the EEC last week. The case of the Miguelianos, also with a definitive conviction, has been excluded because it involves an association of faithful. With a restrictive criterion, the classification of bishops eliminates lay cases from the count. Another way to cut the numbers from the bottom line.

It is also overwhelming the number of cases that are not initially investigated and nothing is done because it is considered time-barred or the accused has died. In 228 of the 806 registered cases there was no canonical investigation. Sometimes the entity limits itself to sending the case to the Prosecutor's Office, which files it because it is time-barred, and then classifies it as “not proven.” There is an extreme case in the Augustinian Recollects in their school in Salamanca, who did not open an internal investigation because no one reported him to the order, although there was a conviction in the courts: he was tried and convicted in 1996 for abusing at least eight victims, and He was then sent as a missionary to Peru without any disciplinary measures. It is a case that this newspaper revealed and it now emerges that "no canonical investigation was initiated, as alleged, because there was no complaint to the order."

The list brings to light many unpublished cases that the Church has kept silent about. In Pamplona, ​​one from 2019 of a priest who abused two girls adopted from foreign countries. In Seville, a complaint of abuse of an altar boy from 2019 is reported, due to events from the previous year, with other possible victims, but "there is no civil investigation", when in principle the case has not prescribed. The Jesuits do not give much information about each case, but they do provide relevant data: for example, a dozen were reported by former provincials, which reflects the cover-up for years by the order.

It is evident that for the victims the response is a lottery: the action in the cases depends on the good disposition of the bishop or the superior of each order. The margin is very wide, from doing nothing, taking refuge in strictly bureaucratic matters, to going beyond what is obligatory out of mere sensitivity. For example, in a Piarist case the accused had died, but that did not prevent an investigation from being opened and restorative meetings with the victims. Although the order does not provide data on the rest of the cases (31 in total). The same thing happened in Ávila, where the bishop ordered an investigation into a case of a deceased priest, known through EL PAÍS, although “no prior canonical investigation was appropriate.” He is listed as “not proven, but plausible.” The same situation was repeated with the bishop of Santander, who met with the victim.

The lack of coordination of the Church, where each diocese and order goes it alone and acts according to its own criteria, means that it is not known whether or not cases in which it does not have jurisdiction are referred to the responsible entity. For example, the bishopric of Mondoñedo-Ferrol notes a case of the Franciscans and says: “There was no dialogue with the order.” It remains in limbo. There are also orders that in principle do not have registered cases, but then there are dioceses that do report complaints against their members, which do not fall under their jurisdiction. For example, an unknown case in the diocese of Getafe: two priests of Communion and Liberation "with 11 possible victims", although the section of this congregation claims to have never known of any case.

In most cases, dioceses and orders ignore past cases that have appeared in the press and the EL PAÍS database. They limit themselves to reviewing the complaints they have received in recent years and have only occasionally reviewed their files. Regarding the 545 cases that this newspaper has sent in its four reports, between 2021 and 2023, the majority of entities have not done anything if the victim did not later agree to contact them. This newspaper will cross-check the report's data with its database in the coming weeks to include all the new information that has come to light.

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