The Spanish Episcopal Conference yesterday presented the testimonies of 927 victims who went to its offices to report a total of 728 cases of child abuse. Nine of the 202 dioceses have not received any complaints. Far from seeing the bottle as half full, the bishops harshly criticized those who took advantage of their ecclesiastical status to abuse minors. “What went wrong?” they said.
The ecclesiastical sphere must be a safe sphere, especially for children, and it has not been so for these 927 people, many of whom accuse the religious themselves. Accusations have so far been collected against 728, most of whom are already dead. If their crimes have prescribed for ordinary justice, they have not done so for the canonical, the bishops emphasized. The two oldest cases date back to the 1940s.
Yesterday was a double day at the headquarters of the Episcopal Conference. On the one hand, the Instruction against sexual abuse was presented, which can be read in its entirety on our website. A second text was also presented, the Para dar luz report.
The first document is an action protocol that apologizes for “the bitter lessons of the past”. The second collects the complaints of those who suffered the crimes, regardless of the date. “The status of victim never prescribes: a witness is always relevant, even if it is for events long ago and of someone already dead”.
Many religious people criticized until now that the focus was on the Church because sexual abuse occurs in many other areas, such as the academic or the health sector. The ball-out strategy has not been used by the Episcopal Conference, which recognized that the number of 728 religious may seem small compared to the almost 25,000 today, “but it is not”. A single case, the bishops insisted, is “a tragedy for the victim, for his environment and for the whole Church”.
The robot portrait of the accused is like this: almost all, except for five women, are men; most of the victims (82.7%) are also men (children, when it happened). 52% of those reported are clergy; there are also 208 non-ordained religious and 92 lay people. 75% of the abuses are from before 1990. The “most significant” decades are the sixties, seventies and eighties. Most of the perpetrators, 63%, have already died. The school area registered the majority of assaults (47%), followed by the parish area, and seminars, boarding schools, school holidays, pilgrimages and camping trips.
The Episcopal Conference used very harsh words yesterday. José Gabriel Vera, communication manager of the institution, said: “The condition of the victims never prescribes. It is important that they know that we want to repair them because we recognize the suffering they have experienced. Sexual abuse hurts us and knowing the truth is essential, because without truth there is no Church”. You need to know “what went wrong”.
