The Supreme Court (TS) has confirmed the 20-year prison sentence of a priest and religion teacher at the Santa María de Guadalupe school in Córdoba for sexually abusing four girls, between 10 and 13 years old.
The convicted man taught classes since the 2012/2013 academic year at that school (known as the Franciscans) and at least until 2014 he was parish priest of the Santa María de Guadalupe Parish.
It was then that the religious man, with the initials J.M.R.G., began to sexually abuse several students who were in third and fourth grade, whom he touched inside the classroom, habitually sitting them on his knees when correcting homework or taking advantage of the fact that he stayed there with the girls during recess, according to the sentence.
Already in the 2014/2015 academic year, during a camp organized by the school itself, the priest who at that time was no longer teaching them, but was the parish priest of Santa María de Guadalupe, asked two girls to go to his office “with the excuse of collecting sweets.
There, he sexually abused one of them, who later told everything to her parents, but instead of reporting the facts, they sent a letter to the school director.
The educational center transferred the religious to another town but did not report the events, while the minor was diagnosed by the pediatrician with “adjustment disorder.” “The minor received assistance at the Córdoba Centro community mental health unit because she was afraid of men who might approach her and when she passed in front of the aforementioned office.”
Five years later, when they were going to organize a party at school, already in 2019, on the occasion of high school graduation, the possibility of inviting the priest to it was discussed.
Due to this, this minor anxiously relived what happened to the point that at the Córdoba Fair she consumed many alcoholic beverages and when she was assisted by agents of the Local Police, she revealed to them what had happened with her teacher, which gave rise to starting investigations against him.
The Court of Córdoba sentenced him to 20 years in prison for four continuous crimes of sexual abuse of people under thirteen years of age, with precedence of his status as their teacher, a ruling that was ratified by the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia.
The parish priest appealed to the Supreme Court, questioning the credibility of the victims’ and witnesses’ accounts and warning of contradictions in their testimonies, which is why “no logical or motivated reasons are deduced to support such a serious sentence.”
But the high court “reasonably excludes the possibility of fabulatory tendencies in them” and highlights the “essential agreement of what they narrated at the trial with what was recorded in the first examinations before the National Police, which reinforces the reliability of their testimony”.
To this he adds that “there is no doubt that in the circumstances of time and place described, his status as a priest and parish priest, and above all, a teacher in the school of eleven and twelve year old girls, gave him superiority over the little ones.” that notoriously limited, if not annulled, their freedom and their ability to react to the abuses to which they were subjected.
“This prevalence, as well as its knowledge and use by the accused, is implicit in the narrative, from which it results unequivocally. Nothing else can be understood,” highlights the Chamber.
