EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish Church in 2018 and has a data base updated with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light, you can write to us at: [email protected]. If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: [email protected].
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“We have always been alone, each one with his secret. I had never met any of them, and I wanted to talk to them, get to know them, know who they were, what their life had been like.” Since the day Leonor García appeared in this newspaper, in December 2021, recounting the abuse she suffered in her childhood at the hands of a priest, she began to meet other people who went through the same thing. It happened to her in the Santa Marina sanatorium, in Bilbao, in the seventies, with the priest Martín Valle García, a name that she finally managed to find out this year. Her case is one of the 251 included in the first report that EL PAÍS then delivered to the Pope and the president of the Episcopal Conference (CEE), Juan José Omella. On a television set where several victims were interviewed, Leonor met Emiliano Álvarez, one of the first to appear in the media. She seemed like such a special guy that she wanted to continue talking to him and went to see him in León. She took her Renault Clio and He modified it so he could sleep inside, with his dog. ink. His brother had an idea: record it on video. She is a journalist and writer, and it was the beginning of a documentary that has taken her across half of Spain talking to other victims, 20,000 kilometers of confession, who signs as Leonor Paqué.
Emiliano died in August 2022, still waiting for justice, and was unable to see the end of the investigation commissioned by Congress, which awakened hope in him. “I think about Emiliano, how much I would have liked to give him a hug today,” Leonor said on Friday, after learning about the Ombudsman’s report. For many of the first victims who came to light, when doing so meant crashing into social rejection, recognition of the truth comes late. Emiliano Álvarez was the first victim of pedophilia in the Church who agreed to go before a camera for this newspaper in September 2018. The priest Ángel Sánchez Cao had abused him between 1976 and 1978 at the Minor Seminary of San José de La Bañeza, in Lion. For him, it was “the slab of fear” that he had to carry throughout his life and led to heroin. “All the drugs were too few to calm the damage they had caused me,” he repeated.
When he spoke with EL PAÍS he had already registered a complaint with the bishopric of Astorga. The canonical sentence took five years, and he was right. The bishop did not deign to summon him, he communicated the ruling to him via WhatsApp. The message also reached Lucas, the fictitious name of another victim of the same priest, in the same seminary, who does not want to reveal his name and until now had never appeared in the press. If Emiliano represents the victims who came to light, he is the other hidden side, which in reality is the vast majority. He now appears in Leonor’s documentary.
Lucas suffered abuse between 1979 and 1980, he spent his life with that trauma and suddenly one day, in 2015, he met by chance with his attacker, who was still in a parish, working with children. “There it was, it was like seeing the wolf in the mountains, it made your hair stand on end, and everything came to my mind.” He found the Stolen Childhood association and reported it to the Church. But he always preferred to avoid the press. Appearing in public, telling his pain in a newspaper, has been one more sacrifice that the victims have been forced to make as a last resort. “With Leonor there was another empathy, it has been easier for me to talk, she has gone through that,” he explains.
“I have told you the before and after, the treatment we have received of absolute contempt from the majority of society. How are you going to go against a priest?” Lucas and Emiliano saw how the priest who abused them even filed a complaint, and some of the parishioners collected signatures in defense of the aggressor. “Emiliano suffered a lot, when he appeared in the press they went after him, to discredit him. We have once again been re-victimized by society. They tell you: ‘I was there and they didn’t do anything to me.’ Of course, just because it didn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to me.” Lucas relates how abuse “modifies your behavior, I was a very happy person, it makes you distrustful, more sour.” He believes that the Ombudsman’s report is “another step forward”: “At least now people know the evil that exists, the permissiveness that these evildoers have had. “I don’t know if anything will change, but more people will understand, new victims who had kept it quiet will come out.”
Like him, hundreds of people affected have told EL PAÍS over the years not only about their abuse, but also how they lose their jobs, how there is no money to pay for therapy, how relationships with others, and with their partners, become difficult. Leonor’s documentary wants to tell that, and brings together 12 testimonies, plus hers, from four women and eight men, in four chapters. She is in the editing phase and looking for a platform or a production company that is interested in participating in the project. She has financed it herself, although one of the victims, one of the few who had received compensation, made a bizum upon finding out that he was sleeping in the car, so that he could go to a hotel that night. “There are victims who remain very alone. One sleeps with a baseball bat in her bed, because she still feels threatened. Another I can’t sleep without the light on. It is as if we were damaged material, emotionally, sexually, socially,” says Leonor.
The victims of abuse in the Church in their childhood have until now been a hidden crowd, they did not even know how many they were. One of the first to appear on TV was Javier Paz, who denounced abuse by a priest in Salamanca in an interview on La Sexta in 2014. “The next day I had hundreds of messages on Facebook from other victims telling me about their case.” “They didn’t know what to do or where to go and when they saw me they wrote to me, as if I could help them,” he remembers. Since then, an underground network of support, of WhatsApp groups, has been created, and the first window to come to light was the complaint email that EL PAÍS opened in 2018, to which hundreds of people wrote. For Javier Paz, the Ombudsman’s report marks a milestone: “After almost 13 years since I began to talk with the Church, after the inaction of the bishopric of Salamanca and feeling devastated by the damage they did to me, later denouncing it publicly , reaching today means reaching, not the end of the path, but a part of it, a goal that I dreamed of years ago. Ángel Gabilondo has forcefully and clearly defended the victims’ need for justice, recognition and measures to assist them. A door has been opened, let’s hope that times are not too slow now, we need an answer now.”
José Antonio Pérez still remembers the impact in Bilbao when his story was published in this newspaper in 2019. He was the first victim to accuse Don Chemi, a former Salesian from the Deusto school, of abusing him in the 1980s. His story encouraged dozens of other victims to come forward. In two weeks, the Ertzaintza received around thirty complaints. In response to the scandal, the Bilbao city council issued a statement of support and there was a neighborhood demonstration in front of the school. The Salesians, who for days claimed to have no knowledge of the facts, finally acknowledged that they covered up the religious for decades. The case of abuse in the Salesians of Deusto was the first to have a great citizen and political response, which also helped other victims of the Salesian schools to make their case known. In any case, everything had expired and the accused, who still organized activities with minors, continued without problems with his life in Bilbao.
![Church pedophilia](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/79snZxzqSFTGPF9EDTppcL-tKH4=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/CMKABVEX6RCTXNFA2YVHDB5SUA.jpg)
In the final stretch of the documentary, the Ombudsman’s report has arrived. “Our intuition was true: in a country, with our history of national Catholicism, it has been much worse than in France and other countries. Personally, I think about my mother, if she had seen this, perhaps she would have been able to leave in peace, and stop crying and feeling guilty for the attacks that she could not protect us from. We have managed to recognize a universal shame, that it was disgraceful to look the other way, that we were children, on the part of the Church. Is something going to happen? By reporting are we going to stop being suspects of we don’t know exactly what? Is this society, the politicians, going to take action? Will the Church pay a price, will it face responsibility for it? They are all questions. And the desire to cry and hug fellow fighters. The report is a starting point for everything that has to happen: recognizing the victims, caring for them and respecting them. I hope that the little girl in me, attacked and scared, with everything that was taken from me, can rest in peace.”
![Leonor, victim of church abuse, next to her car converted into a caravan.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/Fi8JZEq51C8cC5pfOyQ-3qfxmHg=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/3YMLDJC3ZZBCPPOORADB7FKZOE.jpg)
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