Government of Spain seeks to investigate sexual abuse of the Catholic Church

Investigation of child abuse puts Benedict XVI in trouble 1:35

(CNN) --

A senior official for Spain's prime minister said Monday that the ruling Socialist Party wants the state Ombudsman's office to investigate the many allegations of alleged child abuse by Catholic Church clergy. Spanish.

"This guarantees the privacy of the victims. The Ombudsman has the independence, the authority and the prestige to direct the investigation," said Félix Bolaños, minister of the Spanish presidency and one of the main advisers to President Pedro Sánchez, in an interview with Radio SER this Monday.

Bolaños said that the Socialist Party was going to present a motion in parliament on Monday requesting the investigation and that it had already invited Spain's Catholic Church to participate in it.

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A high-ranking government official told CNN that the president also supports this investigative initiative, but has not spoken publicly about it because relations with the Church are part of the Bolaños administration.

"This is not against the Catholic Church or people who believe in the Catholic religion," Bolaños said, but added that "there can be no impunity for the abuses that have occurred over decades."

But for the Spanish Episcopal Conference, the church's governing body, "the place for an investigation is the Spanish judiciary," the Rev. José Gabriel Vera, head of the church's information office, told CNN on Monday.

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Vera affirms that the 70 Spanish Catholic dioceses received 220 complaints of alleged abuse of minors since 2001 and have forwarded to the Vatican those they have considered credible, following Church policy.

About 160 of them have been resolved, she said, adding that she didn't know what the results were in those cases.

The alleged abuses have been in the public eye since a major Spanish newspaper, El País, published its own investigation last December, reporting that it had uncovered 251 new cases of alleged abuse, involving at least 1,237 victims between 1943 and 2018.

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Following the newspaper's report, Spain's central prosecutor's office in Madrid asked its regional offices in late January if they have any ongoing investigations into alleged sexual abuse of minors by the Catholic Church, or if they are aware of any some ongoing case in the regional courts.

The central office requested a response by February 10, a prosecution official told CNN.

"It's about knowing the current situation in the criminal field. Are there many cases? Or just a few?" Said the prosecutor's official, in relation to the query.

President Sánchez met last Thursday with one of the alleged victims, his office confirmed.

And he met on January 24 with the head of the Spanish Catholic Church.

"What we are doing in Spain is not different from what other countries, France, Germany or Canada are doing," Bolaños said in the radio interview.

"From the international experience that we have already seen, it is not in the short term. We are talking about years. It is not an easy investigation."

Sexual abuse in the Church Spain