Some twenty people have denounced the continued sexual abuse of a priest in Barcelona and Caldes d’Estrac (Maresme) in the 1960s and 1970s, according to El PaÃs and ‘Catalunya RÃ dio’. On the other hand, La Vanguardia has been able to contact some former students of the school he directed and they have recognized that the Mosen was a pedophile who “had to flee the town because some parents were going after him.”
The denounced priest, Josep Vendrell Cortasa, died in 2004 and some of the victims do not rule out “that it was a suicide” since he left Caldetas “wearing nothing, because some parents were looking for him to beat him up.” However, for years the town was divided between supporters of “del mossèn” and its detractors.
The victims were children between the ages of 8 and 15, and some suffered weekly rapes. The victims fear that there are more people affected in Montcada i Reixac, where he also served as a parish priest between 1975 and 1990. At least fifteen people have sent their stories to the Ombudsman, who has information on some twenty-five cases related to Vendrell .
He was in Caldes d’Estrac between 1970 and 1975, where he was also in charge of the escort group, the school and the parish school, which also had a boarding school, where he committed the abuses, especially at night. Through his work, he earned the sympathy of the population “also from the ladies” because he was, as they remember, “a very attractive man” but his sexual instinct went other ways.
“He was a spiritual director and wanted to be aware of family problems,” says one of his students, who remembers how some parents called him out for meddling in family issues, such as disputes between marriages. Precisely these problems were the pretext for being alone with many of the students of the parochial school. “He openly asked us if we masturbated and that we shouldn’t because our ears would be hard” when in reality, they reasoned years later, what he was doing was looking for new victims for abuse. Also in these meetings, some of the witnesses to whom La Vanguardia has had access say that he “gave us whiskey and tried to stun us.”
Many students from neighboring towns, especially from Arenys de Mar, attended the parish boarding school in Caldes d’Estrac. Many of them recounted how the parish priest, at night, would call one of the inmates to his rooms. “He was well known throughout the world” but if on some occasion, if the fact was discussed “you would get angry because they thought you were apologizing for your misbehavior” say the former students. On one occasion, they remember “a boy from Barcelona arrived, very big and stocky, who after a while punched the parish priest” supposedly for trying to make off with him, but the case did not go any further.
He arrived after being denounced in Barcelona by some families to the police and the bishopric when he worked in the Agrupament Escolta Aureli Escarré, linked to the parish of Santo Tomás de Aquino. However, the rest of the families gave full support to the priest. They also denounced families from Caldetas, but the archbishopric limited himself to transferring him. “On one occasion they told us that, please, we should not report to the courts, that the bishop was in charge of punishing the mosen,” which never happened.
After learning of the facts, “in Caldetas there was a true popular upheaval” and when the Mosen fled, the parochial school was left without a director and “it fell into decline, until they had to close it,” the same sources point out. Some parents even went so far as to denounce him to the police, but according to what they say, the commissioner did not go beyond a confrontation “because the priest was also a lieutenant in the national army.”
And it is that, in general, the families respected him a lot and no one questioned him, even when he presumed to know their children’s penises, as explained by the victims, who describe him as “a great manipulator, a psychopath and very charismatic”. . He told the parents that he gave sexuality classes to the children. Now, both the victims and the former students of Mosen Vendrell are outraged by the attitude of the Archdiocese, which will not open an investigation. “We don’t want revenge, we want them to apologize” for having allowed these pedophilic practices for years.
