The Parliament continues with the work of the commission on ecclesiastical pederasty. This issue was also raised in Congress, but in this case the investigation was delegated to the Ombudsman, Ãngel Gabilondo, who requested a report from the Church on its internal files. Coinciding with the delivery of the report, the Catalan Chamber has summoned Cardinal Joan Josep Omella as a witness to the commission.
The citation of Omella, archbishop of Barcelona and president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, was approved with the votes of ERC, Junts, the commons and the CUP. PSC-United parliamentarians voted against it, while the other groups did not participate. The formation of Junts, in favor of the appearance, allied itself with the PSC to prevent them from also declaring the archbishop of Tarragona and the bishops of Vic and Solsona.
The socialists rejected these statements because they understand that they overlap with the already planned testimonies of those responsible for prevention in each diocese. Together, for his part, he made similar arguments and emphasized that with Joan Josep Omella the ecclesiastical hierarchy is already sufficiently represented. The Episcopal Conference has not officially reacted to the request of the Parliament of Catalonia, but sources close to the top of the Church show their discomfort because they consider that everything that Cardinal Omella could explain is already included in the report delivered to the Defender of the Town This document indicates that the Church has received at least 706 complaints of abuse since 1945. Last year, 186 new complaints were registered that affected minors – when the events happened -.
In total, according to the same text delivered to the Defender, 179 victims were minors and seven more were “legally equivalent to minors”, which means that they are teenagers or young people with some type of intellectual disability that diminishes their cognitive abilities, which makes them de facto minors.
The supporters of Omella’s appearance reply that Pope Francis himself has asked for collaboration to uncover all cases of pederasty in the Church. The presence of the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, they add, is justified. “The person in charge must explain the Church’s point of view on this serious problem and what is being done to prevent it from happening again,” explained Junts.
The Parliament’s commission on sexual abuse within the Church plans to hear the testimonies of the right-hand man of the abbot of Montserrat, prior Bernat Juliol, and of the Ombudsman himself, Ãngel Gabilondo, and his counterpart in Catalonia , the Grievance Ombudsman, Esther Giménez Salinas.
Of relevant experts, yes, and of remarkable voices representing the victims, such as the writer Alejandro Palomas and Miguel Hurtado, first whistleblower in the Montserrat case. Other witnesses summoned will be Vicki Bernadet, from the foundation that bears his name, and Manuel Barbero, founder of the Mans Petites association and father of a son who was also the victim of a pederast.
These four people put their faces on the 0 Tolerance platform for Child Sexual Abuse. All four denounce that the Ombudsman does not have “coercive powers to really investigate this cycle”. In his view, five key questions still need to be answered. How many religious pederasts (and employees, volunteers and lay staff of religious institutions) have there been? How many victims did each abuse? What percentage of the clergy has committed pederasty? How many minors have been assaulted by more than one pederast? And how many suffer sequelae?
