The Ombudsman’s report, which estimates 400,000 victims of Church abuse, includes numerous testimonies from boys, girls and adolescents who were sexually assaulted by priests whom they trusted because they were their guardians, because they represented God, because they were friends of their parents. , because they had been welcomed with scholarships in the seminaries… The victims chosen were, almost always, the most vulnerable. We collect some of those testimonies from the report that show the helplessness of children:
The representative of God: “I did what he told me, because for me he was like God. He had to protect me, he was like my safe deposit box. He said that he prayed to God for me and that God would give me everything I needed. Sucking his penis was nothing compared to getting from God what I needed.
In search of the vulnerable. 12-year-old boy: “One day every other day, depending on when I came, because I came almost every day, I would lie on the bed and snog, snog. What I thought was that this is the price I have to pay for “That this guy will put you in a school for posh kids. I thought about it from the first day: ‘I’m in a school for posh kids, you’ll have to pay for something.'”
Threats: “I made excuses not to go, but I blackmailed you with anything. That I would call my parents, because my behavior was inappropriate, that it was a lie, that I wasn’t studying, that my grades were bad… And It cost my parents a lot of money and effort, a real sacrifice, because all of us [five children] studied. I was caught up in the subject of my parents.”
“In the assembly hall they showed us movies almost every week. Curiously, they always sent me to the last row […]. They would sit me in the back and this priest would come in the back, always in the middle, with me next to them. They would turn off lights and he hugged me. We were wearing shorts. It started at the knee and went to your parts, to your penis. One time, he took my hands and took them towards his thighs and towards his penis. And my hands didn’t “They were the only ones there, there was another child.”
12-year-old boy: “I knocked on the door from the outside with my knuckles, I heard a voice inside that told me to come in. At first glance, he was an older man. I walked through the door calmly, and even excited, since our tutor, what had told us, is that this person was going to listen to us to help us. All those expectations were distorted when this man, without even saying hello, told me: ‘undress.’ He told me to come closer to do a first physical assessment, or something like that, while he put the chair with the armrests towards me. He got up and stood behind it. My mind went blank. It was panic, I was more than terrified, I don’t know if it was hot or not, but I was cold , on the verge of shivering. When I felt him start to caress me, all my doubts fell away and my worst fears began to come true. He got up and I remember his hands rubbing me […]. Then I felt a terrible pain and burning in my skin. entrance of the anus. He was trying to insert his finger and it hurt me terribly. I struggled as best I could and turned to look at him. At that moment I still didn’t understand anything and I touched my ass area. It was wet, sticky and smelled very bad. I didn’t know what that was, what was happening and what it was all about, but I wanted to get out of there. I went into total panic, but a repressed, silent panic. He told me to get dressed. I didn’t look at his face, I dressed in silence, terrified. He hid it, pretending that he was filling out some paper, or whatever. “I was dead, I didn’t understand anything at all, I didn’t know what had happened.”
9-year-old boy: “He always started by hitting me on the arms, as if we were boxers. Not very hard at first. And he invited me to hit him anyway. I didn’t dare hit him no matter how well-known he was to my mother. But he insisted and insisted […]. At some point, I responded […]. When I responded, he grabbed me by the neck with the brute force of a grown man, and immobilized me, at the same time trapping my hands. arms… Sometimes we would stay standing, and other times I would fall on the sofa […] I would be paralyzed at his mercy. I remember feeling disgusted when he brought his mouth close to mine and I could feel his breath like an uncontrolled animal. Almost always , while he held me and trapped me, he rubbed against me as I later saw some dogs do with their owners’ legs. That’s when I noticed his hard penis against my body and his rapid breathing of ecstasy.”
Girl of 5 or 6 years old: “I was very small, I must have been 5 or 6 years old, he would hold me, lay me flat and put his hand looking for my sex. Horizontally. He would put his hand inside my panties and touch me, and “Then he gave me some sugared pine nuts that were in a ceramic Christ. ‘Come here, I’ll give you some pine nuts.'”
Child with intellectual disabilities between 7 and 17 years old: “The aggressor contacts him the first time in the playground, sits him on his lap, asks him what his name is, asks him for a kiss on the mouth and gives him twenty-five pesetas. From there he calls him multiple times to come up to his bedroom.”
9-year-old girl: «My older sister took me to catechism (post-communion) […]. In confession, I told this man that sometimes I saw naked people, that was what I considered my great sin […]. The fact is that one day there were several of us children in a semicircle, in some children’s chairs. And this man was in front. And suddenly he grabbed my chair and put his hands inside my vagina, and then he brought my hand to his penis, which was flaccid under his cassock […] “.
Young man between 12 and 15 years old: “His speech was always: ‘I’m doing this for you, because at this age, sex is not clear and your sexual position has to be defined a little.’ I had no idea what he was talking about: ‘let’s see if you have phimosis.’ He sold it as if it was for your own good, so that you would develop properly, your body… And it was always the same, masturbation, ‘oops, you got very little semen, you would have to grow bigger to get more, look what I get I'”.
10-year-old boy: “He gave me an injection, first he put the needle in and I don’t know why he hid behind the screen, while I complained about the pain of having the needle inserted. I immediately realized that he was masturbating. When After a while he gave me the injection and began to touch my ass and genitals, and so on for several long days.
The parents’ friend: “One weekend, he called my parents, saying that he had a fever, to see if they could send me to the house he shared with […], on the street […], to accompany him that night. I went, delighted, proud that the father [name of the aggressor] had thought of me to take care of him. The afternoon and night were normal. The truth is, he didn’t seem very sick to me […], and he prepared a room for me different from his to spend the night. But when I was sleeping, I woke up while the aforementioned religious man was performing fellatio on me. I was not able to react, I pretended to be asleep, and I never told anyone anything.
12-year-old preteen: “From time to time, in good weather, excursions were made, with a few […]. We would go with some food and tents to sleep for a night […]. I took advantage to get into some of the tents […], I noticed that he rubbed himself… They took two or three tents, because he had to leave the person he was going to rape alone in one tent.
Another young man: “He always did the same thing: he had a paramilitary appearance, with a black beret with the fleur-de-lis and a brown stick like the military, with which he penetrated me. When we were all drunk, he always did the same thing: he talked about exorcisms, he spoke in Latin, he explained scary things and then came the big moment: ‘who is going to be chosen to sleep with me?’ 80% of the time it was my turn.
